Finance
Monthly reporting with Claude
Monthly reporting is mostly the same work repeated twelve times a year against slightly different data, which is exactly the shape a repeatable setup pays off on. The goal here is not to have Claude write your commentary for you. It is to get from an export to a clean, formula-checked workbook and a first draft of the narrative in one sitting, so the time you spend is spent on the explaining rather than on the assembling.
Compiled from public documentation. Not independently tested.
What you need
- Claude Cowork
- Claude for Excel
- Claude.ai
Skills, plugins and connectors
skill
xlsx skill
From anthropics/skills. Builds and edits workbooks with formulas, charts and conditional formatting, and validates that the output contains no formula errors.
product
Claude for Excel
From Anthropic. Works inside the spreadsheet rather than producing a file to download.
skill
docx skill
From anthropics/skills. Turns the finished numbers into the written report.
The order to do it in
- 01
Put last month's report in a project
As the reference. The format you already use is a better instruction than any description of it.
- 02
Upload this month's raw export
Do not clean it first - the xlsx skill is built for messy source data, and cleaning it by hand removes the step you are trying to automate.
- 03
Ask for the reconciliation first
Before the report: what changed against last month, which lines moved more than your materiality threshold, and which rows do not tie out.
- 04
Check the exceptions yourself
Everything downstream inherits this step.
- 05
Ask for the workbook in your structure
Formula validation is part of the skill, so a returned file with a #REF! is a signal that the source data broke an assumption.
- 06
Ask for the commentary last
With the instruction to state what moved and by how much, and to flag anything it cannot explain from the data rather than guessing at a cause.
Roughly what it costs
A monthly cycle on a mid-sized dataset is comfortable on Pro. Daily or multi-entity reporting is where the session limit becomes the binding constraint.
This guide is compiled, not tested. If you have run this workflow, tell us at info@claudenetwork.com.