"I never saw a human document this that good."
That was me, a few Wednesdays ago, in front of about 70 people on a live Claude in Excel masterclass.
I'd just dropped 100 invoices and a bank statement into Claude Cowork, started the reconciliation Skill, and let it run while I answered chat questions.
I was 7 years an auditor before I became the AI finance guy. I have audited a lot of recs in my life.
When I came back to the screen and read what Claude had produced I said it out loud, on camera: "I never saw a human documenting this that good."
I am not exaggerating. I am a finance guy who used to sign audit files. And the file that came back was cleaner than 90% of what I used to review during my time at PwC
So today I want to show you exactly how to use that Skill, and why AI is now so much more than just ‘prompting’.
When a 1-time activity creates 2x the work
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So, let me explain to you what most finance pros have to do, and why you don’t need to work this way now.
You do the rec once in January. Then you do half of it again in March, when the auditor asks for the work. If the documentation never existed the first time, your team spends another 10 to 15 hours creating it.
But here is another problem. Every person documents recs differently. One leaves a paper trail. Another leaves only three bullet points. The third leaves a tab called "Final_v3_revised_FINAL.xlsx" and goes home.
When they leave, get promoted, or take a week off – the next person has to reverse-engineer what was done.
But you sign it off anyway, because the working is in someone else's head and you do not have time to redo it before close. You trust it is right.
Then the auditor finds out for you, three months later.
That one activity ends up costing you twice as much in cleanup, in handover, and in lost trust in the process.
I lived this, as I was the auditor asking for the file in March.
So, to fix this, the easiest thing you can do is, build the documentation into the process, and make sure it’s super consistent.
Your Pre-Packaged Reconciliation Workflow
A Skill is a packaged set of instructions that tells Claude how you do a specific task. You build it once, and Claude activates it whenever it sees a relevant task.
But – the reconciliation workflow I used last week is in the official Anthropic Finance plugin.
For the finance plugin, you install it inside Claude Cowork, point it at a folder containing your bank statement and your invoices, and let it work.
What it produced was not a spreadsheet with a few highlighted rows. It was working papers in the SAS 96 sense (Statement on Auditing Standards No. 96 – more info here).
Matched lines, variance categories, a documented audit trail and evidence references. This is what a reviewer can pick up and follow really easily.
This is why I was so surprised during the masterclass, as most analysts are not trained to write working papers.
Claude, with the right Skill, is.
6-Steps to Auditor-Grade Reconciliation
By the end of these 6 steps you will have a workflow that takes a bank statement and a folder of invoices and returns reconciled working papers, that you can use every month to produce the same formatted outputs.
1. Install the plugin. Open Claude Desktop. Go to Cowork → Customize → Browse plugins. Find the Finance plugin published by Anthropic and install it. The reconciliation Skill is inside, alongside variance analysis and journal entry. This is the same library I demoed live.
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2. Create your folders. Create one project folder. Inside, two subfolders: Bank_Statement and Invoices. Drop your statement in the first. Drop the 100+ invoices (PDFs or Excel) in the second. The structure is the brief – Claude reads it the way a new analyst would.
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3. Create a Cowork Project. Open Cowork. In the left sidebar, click Projects, then the + button. Choose Use an existing folder and select the project folder you just created. Give the project a name (e.g. "Monthly Reconciliation") and save. This mounts your folder so Claude can read and write to it at the start of every session, you only do this once.
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4. Call the Skill, do not write a prompt. Open your project in Cowork. Type a forward slash, pick the reconciliation Skill, hit send. That is it. No prompt engineering. The Skill is the prompt.
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5. Make Claude show its working. Before you accept the output, ask Claude to add a verification tab – sum of matched lines, count of mismatches, list of unmatched invoices, source reference for every figure – SAS 96 wants the reviewer to follow the work. So do you.
6. Review only the exceptions. Now you spend 45 minutes on the 47 items that need judgment. The other 4,631 lines reconciled cleanly without you.
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Important – if your data is messy, this will not save you. The ‘garbage in, garbage out’ rule still stands.
Or – as we say in France “on ne fait pas de bon vin avec de mauvais raisins” – which means ‘you don't make good wine from bad grapes.’
Spend 5 minutes naming files properly before you run it.
The One Thing to Remember
Here you are not saving time, you are eliminating future work that you do not need to do in the first place!
So there are 2 things that I want you to do.
- Run the ‘Finance’ plugin this week, more info here.
- Start asking yourself this question:
Ask yourself, ask a colleague, ask Claude, it doesn’t matter.
The best systems are the ones that do not create more systems to manage later on 😉
Best,
Your AI Finance Expert,
– Nicolas
P.S – Need help with Claude? Hit reply and I will help where I can.
P.P.S – The reconciliation is just one move. Here are 4 more ways to use Claude that most finance pros haven't tried yet → Claude for Finance: 4 Power Moves You're Not Using
