Anthropic now gives away ready-made skills for finance work. A skill is a set of instructions Claude loads when a task calls for it: how to structure a bank reconciliation, which accruals to book at month end, how to explain a margin drop to a CEO. You install it once, and Claude follows a professional method instead of improvising.
They are good. They are also not the hard part. More on that at the end.
Two bundles, one decision
Everything below comes from two official Anthropic plugins. Both are free.
- Finance is built for accountants and controllers. Reconciliations, journal entries, statements, variance analysis, close management and audit support.
- Small Business is built for owners and lean finance teams. Bills, cash flow, chasing invoices, and closing the month against Shopify, Stripe or PayPal.
If you are the accountant or the controller, start with Finance. If you are the owner, or a one-person finance team, start with Small Business. Many teams end up using both.
The eight worth installing first
1. Reconciliation (Finance)
Compares your general ledger to a subledger, a bank statement or a third-party balance, then sorts the reconciling items and ages them. It covers bank recs, AR and AP subledgers, and intercompany.
Try: "Reconcile the attached bank statement against the cash account for October. List every unmatched item, how old it is, and what it probably is."
2. Journal entry prep (Finance)
Prepares accruals, prepaid amortization, depreciation, payroll and revenue entries with proper debits, credits and supporting detail, written so an auditor can follow it.
Try: "Prepare the October AP accrual from this list of goods received but not yet invoiced."
3. Close management (Finance)
Builds the month-end close checklist, puts tasks in order, tracks what depends on what, and shows where the close is stuck. Useful when the close lives in one person's head.
Try: "Build a five-day close calendar for us. Bank recs on day one, accruals on day two, P&L review on day four."
4. Variance analysis (Finance)
Breaks a variance into its drivers (price versus volume, rate versus mix), applies a materiality threshold, and writes the explanation in plain language for management.
Try: "Gross margin dropped three points against September. Here are both P&Ls and sales by product. Explain why, in five sentences for the owner."
5. Financial statements (Finance)
Produces the income statement, balance sheet and cash flow statement with a period comparison, and flags material changes. It defaults to US GAAP presentation, so tell it if you report under Israeli GAAP or IFRS.
6. Month-end prep (Small Business)
Reconciles the ledger against what Shopify, Stripe, PayPal or Square actually settled. It flags suspicious duplicates and missing receipts, writes a plain-English summary of the month, and exports a close packet as a spreadsheet plus a one-page PDF. For any business that sells online, this is the one.
7. AP processor (Small Business)
Works the bill pile. It reads bills from the inbox, from PDFs or from phone photos, pulls out vendor, amount and due date, codes each one, matches it to the purchase order and the delivery note, and stages a payment run. Nothing is paid until a person approves it.
8. Cash flow snapshot (Small Business)
Builds a 30, 60 and 90 day cash forecast from receivables, payables and how fast your customers really pay, with confidence ranges and named risks. It answers the question owners ask most: will we make payroll?
Also worth a look: Invoice chase in the Small Business plugin drafts payment reminders matched to each customer's history, gentle for good payers and firmer for repeat late ones. You approve every message before it goes.
The basics underneath
Two skills come built into Claude and make everything above work: xlsx, which reads and builds real Excel files with working formulas, and pdf, which reads statements, invoices and scanned documents. You do not need to install them.
If your team lives in Excel, Anthropic also has an Excel add-in that puts Claude inside the workbook itself. It has been available on paid plans since January.
How to install
In the Claude desktop app, open claude.com/plugins, choose Finance or Small Business, and install. In Claude Code:
claude plugin marketplace add anthropics/knowledge-work-plugins
claude plugin install finance@knowledge-work-plugins
claude plugin install small-business@knowledge-work-plugins
After that you just describe the task. Claude picks the right skill on its own. The source for both plugins is public on GitHub if you want to read exactly what each skill tells Claude to do.
What changes for an Israeli finance team
A few things the guides written for American companies will not tell you.
- Your accounting system is probably not connected. The plugins connect directly to QuickBooks, Xero, NetSuite, Zoho Books, MYOB and Sage. Priority, Hashavshevet and Rivhit have no ready connector. Every skill still works from an Excel or CSV export, which is fine to start. A live connection needs a custom connector.
- Skip the tax skill. The tax organizer in the Small Business plugin is built for US federal tax: quarterly estimates and 1099 forms. It says so itself and hands non-US businesses a closed-books packet for their accountant instead. Israeli VAT reporting is not covered.
- Set the currency and year end at setup. The Small Business plugin asks for country, currency and financial year end. Put in Israel, shekels and your year end, or every report will assume dollars and a calendar year.
- Decide what Claude may see. Bank statements and payroll are sensitive. Use a company Claude account with clear rules, not someone's personal login. MIT found employees at over 90% of companies already use personal AI tools at work, mostly with nobody in charge of it.
The skills are free. Using them is the work.
Installing all of this takes about ten minutes. What takes weeks is everything around it: choosing the first process, getting clean data out of Priority every month, deciding what Claude may and may not touch, training the bookkeeper who has done reconciliations her own way for twelve years, and checking that the new way is still in use in month three.
Start with one process. Reconciliation is usually the best first one, because the result is easy to check and the time saved shows up in the first month. Get it working for real, with the person who does it, then move to the next.
That second part is what we do.