"If only Claude could help us with this, we would be so happy."

I have heard that almost word-for-word from a healthcare services company, a private equity firm, a venture-backed startup, and a global restaurant franchise. Four businesses with nothing in common, in different countries, on different systems, all pointing at the same type of task.

And here is the part that still gets me. The thing they are quietly desperate for is not the hard stuff. It is one of the easiest, most dependable things Claude does. They had simply never been shown it or told where to start.

This week, I am showing you. The free section breaks down the one task I would teach any finance team first, the five shapes it takes, and why it beats every more impressive use case. The subscriber section hands you the whole thing as a hands-on lab: practice files, the exact prompts, the messy correction loop where the real learning happens, and the setup that turns one good result into a process you run every month.

And if you would rather build this with me in the room, the next cohort opens right below.

This week's edition hands you one task. The cohort is where we build the rest together, on real finance files, until the work runs without you.

Four live sessions for CFOs and finance leaders ready to use Claude on real work.

Dates: July 14, 21, 28, and August 4, at 9:00 am PT / 12:00 pm ET, 60 minutes each.

Included: session recordings, workbooks, a finance-specific prompt library, sample datasets, and support between sessions.

One requirement: a paid Claude subscription (Pro, Max, Teams, or Enterprise) to take part.

It starts July 14, just two weeks away, and it is currently $499, down from $799. If you have been meaning to get yourself or your team properly using Claude, this is the run to join.

Reserve your seat!

If you only have time to learn one thing in Claude, I can tell you what it should be. Not because it is the most impressive thing it does. Because it is the thing you will use the most.

Over the past months, I have trained and helped many companies put Claude to work within their finance teams.

And when they hire me, the most frequent thing I hear is some version of the same sentence. "If only Claude could help us with this, we would be so happy." The striking part is what "this" turns out to be. Different company, different system, different language in the office, and almost always the exact same task.

It always looks like this. Take one or more messy source files, usually Excel or a PDF that becomes Excel, and turn them into a finished Excel file that follows your own template and your own logic. That is the whole thing. Not a chatbot. Not a research assistant. A quiet, repeatable file-to-file transformation that you already do by hand every month.

Once you start looking for it, you see it everywhere. The requests fall into one of five shapes:

These workflows can look different, but essentially they're all the same.

That is it. Categorize, reconcile, consolidate, map, match. Five shapes that cover an enormous amount of what a finance team actually does in a month.

Here is the part people underestimate. Almost every smaller company still runs on Excel. Not a polished system, not an automated pipeline. A folder of spreadsheets and a person who knows where everything is.

The private equity firm reconciled investor statements by copying and pasting the same prompt twenty-four times per fund. The franchise matched bank payments to invoices by eye, every week. The startup consolidated two entities across two countries entirely by hand.

This is the real state of finance operations, and it is more common than anyone admits.

The work is manual, repetitive, and quietly error-prone. It takes the most hours for the least actual judgment. Which is exactly why it is the right place to start. The stakes on any single file are low, the inputs and outputs are structured, and best of all, you can check the result against numbers you already trust.

Here’s how you do it

One caution before you run at it. This is not a button you press once and walk away from. The output will not be 100 percent right, especially when real edge cases show up, and that is fine as long as you treat it correctly. Two rules carry you a long way. Never trust the output blind, and always verify against a total you already know. Expect roughly 90 percent done automatically, with a human deciding the genuine unknowns. A tool that knows when to stop and flag something is far more useful than one that confidently codes everything and hands you a tidy, wrong answer.

What surprises me most is how few people realize this is already within reach. Most finance teams have no idea that work like this can now be automated in an afternoon with Claude, as long as you bring the right approach and the right expectations.

So before you go hunting for the clever, complicated use cases, start here. The most valuable thing Claude can do for a finance team is also the most boring and the most common. Learn this one shape well, with a clear method and realistic expectations, and you walk away with something you will reach for every single month.

Those five steps look easy on paper, and the shape is really simple. But the distance between a tidy list and a result you can actually post sits in the details. The exact prompts that work on the first pass. What to do when Claude codes something wrong. How to make it repeat next month without starting over.

That is what the subscriber section gives you. A full practice pack built on a dummy company, Meridian Group, with the source files, the exact prompts in order, the correction loop the way it actually happens, and the setup that turns one good run into a monthly process. Do it once on the practice files, then point it at your own bank export.

Here is my ask for the week. Look at your own month and find the workflows that fit this pattern, the files you convert, populate, or refresh by hand. Pick one and try it. Then hit reply and tell me which workflow it was and how you built it.

And if you get stuck anywhere along the way, drop me a note. I read every reply, and the messy parts are usually where the most useful learning hides.

If you would rather build it with me, Claude in Action Cohort 2 starts July 14. Four live sessions working through exactly this kind of finance workflow on real files. I have an amazing cohort from all over the world this time. Sign up and join us!

See you next Tuesday.

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Until next Tuesday, keep balancing!

Anna Tiomina
AI-Powered CFO