The more I work with finance teams on Claude, the more I see the same gap. It does not matter whether they are on a Teams plan or an Enterprise plan, and it does not even matter how advanced they are. Teams that have been using Claude for months, that have figured out prompting, that are genuinely getting value out of it individually, still have not worked out how to use it together. Who sets up what. How to share standards without sharing everything. How to split the work in a way that actually holds.

That is the part nobody talks about much. There is a lot of content on how to prompt Claude well. Very little on how to run it as a team.

So that is what this edition covers. There are several ways to structure Claude collaboration across a finance team, and each one solves a different problem. I walk through all of them.

This edition is also part two of my CFO Claude Skill Package series. Each week I build and share a ready-to-use Claude skill for finance leaders. This week's skill, shared with all subscribers, is Cash Flow Management.
Make sure you havent missed the Financial Reporting skill I shared last week.

And for paid subscribers, I am adding Audit Controls this week.

The corporate track is officially full. I am genuinely proud of that sentence. Thank you to everyone who signed up.

I am taking a break from mid-June through July 4th, so I will not be onboarding new corporate clients until after the holiday. If you are thinking about bringing Claude training to your team in July or later, now is the time to reach out.

Mixed cohort that runs three Tuesdays starting from May 26th, closes today. We have an amazing group coming together for this one. We are still accepting sign-ups today, but registration closes tonight, May 19th. If you have been thinking about it, this is your last chance.

I will open a waitlist for the next cohort in about a week.

If your team has a Claude Teams or Enterprise account, you probably gave everyone access and called it done. That is a start. Most teams use one or two of the collaboration features the plan includes and ignore the rest. There are four distinct ways to share Claude work across a finance team. Each one does something different. Here is what they are and how they work.

What it does: Set once by your admin, applied to every Claude conversation across the organization automatically. No action required from any team member. Every chat starts with that context already in place.

How to set it up: Go to the admin console, open Settings, and find Company instructions. Write what you want Claude to know about your organization and save. It applies immediately to everyone on the plan.

Where to use it best: Company name, industry, reporting terminology, and any internal language Claude would not otherwise know. Hard rules that apply org-wide: what Claude should never do, what it should always flag. Keep it to what is universally true. Project-specific context belongs elsewhere.

What it does: A Project in Claude chat is a persistent workspace with its own instructions, its own knowledge base, and its own conversation history. It does not reset between sessions. Anyone with access starts from the same baseline every time.

How to set it up: In Claude chat, go to Projects and create a new project. Add your instructions and upload relevant documents to the knowledge base. Click Share: you can invite specific people by email, or open the project to everyone in your organization in view or edit mode.

Where to use it best: Ongoing, function-specific work that a team shares. Month-end close, with your checklist, reporting calendar, and standard commentary format already loaded. Audit prep. A client engagement. Any kind of work where consistent context matters more than starting fresh.

What it does: A skill is a reusable workflow. Build it once and any team member can run it, in Claude chat or in Cowork. It does not drift between users. It does not depend on someone remembering the right prompt. It runs the same way every time.

How to set it up: Skills are built and managed in Cowork and can be shared across the team so anyone can invoke them from their own session.

Where to use it best: Repetitive, structured tasks where consistency matters. Formatting deliverables, running a review checklist, drafting a specific type of document.

Bonus tip: A skill that asks questions before producing output is also a training tool. For example, a variance commentary skill that asks the right questions first, what drove this variance, what does management need to understand, what should we flag, does two things at once. It improves today's output. And it teaches the person using it what good commentary actually requires, because the questions are the thinking. Over time, the standard becomes internalized. That scales in a way that feedback loops never do.

What it does: In Cowork, each person works in their own session on their own machine. Connecting Cowork to a shared folder, such as a SharePoint directory, means outputs land somewhere the whole team can access without anyone needing to see the session itself. Privacy of process, visibility of output.

How to set it up: In Cowork, create a new project or task and select your shared folder as the workspace. Anyone on the team with folder access sees what gets saved there.

Where to use it best: Delegated workflows where the manager cares about the output, not the process. Your AP person runs their reconciliation in Cowork every morning. You open the shared folder and the summary is there. No check-ins required.

Knowing these four mechanisms changes how you use Claude at the team level. But none of them run themselves. Rolling this out properly is a management task. Someone has to decide who owns each project, who maintains the company instructions, which skills get built and by whom. Your team will have questions. Some things will not work the way they expected. You will need to check in, troubleshoot, and adjust.

This is not a technology deployment. It is a workflow change. The tools make the change possible. You still have to lead it.

In the subscriber section, I walk through exactly how I would set this up for a 10-person finance team at a professional services firm: what goes in company instructions, which projects I would create, what I would keep to myself as CFO, and the four skills I would build first.

Building this out for a real team takes a few hours. The company instructions: about 20 minutes. The shared projects: longer, because writing clear project instructions requires actual thinking about how your team works and what consistent output looks like. The skills: the most time, because a good skill is a codified workflow, and getting that right is harder than it sounds.

But it compounds. Every person on the team who opens a shared project starts with the right context. Every skill that runs returns a consistent output. The setup is a few hours once. The return is every working day after that.

Thanks for reading. See you next Tuesday.

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Until next Tuesday, keep balancing!

Anna Tiomina
AI-Powered CFO