Claude Skills for Finance: The Official Plugins, What They Do and Which to Install First

A question we hear more often each month: "Which Claude skills should our finance team actually be using?" It usually follows a demo where someone typed /dcf and got a model back, and a quiet worry that the team is behind.

The honest answer is that the skills are useful, free, and less magic than the demos suggest. They are written instructions for doing a finance job well. Used with your own data and checked by a person, they save real time. This guide covers what Anthropic publishes, what each set is for, and where a UK team should begin.

What Claude Skills Are

A skill is a folder of instructions, and sometimes scripts and templates, that teaches Claude how to do one specific task. When you ask for a reconciliation, Claude loads the reconciliation skill and follows its method: what to compare, how to categorise reconciling items, how to age them, what to flag.

Skills arrive inside plugins. A plugin can bundle several skills, slash commands such as /journal-entry, and connectors to data sources. You install plugins in Claude Cowork on the desktop or in Claude Code, and some skills also run inside Claude for Excel.

The important point for finance is that a skill is readable. You can open it, see exactly what method it applies, and change it. That makes it closer to a procedures manual than a black box, which is the right mental model for a controller deciding whether to trust it.

The Accounting Skills: Close, Recs and Journals

Anthropic's finance plugin, in its open-source knowledge-work-plugins repository, covers the core of a controller's month. It is designed for Cowork and also works in Claude Code. The skills:

It also adds slash commands, including /journal-entry, /reconciliation, /variance-analysis and /income-statement. Without connectors you paste data or upload files. With an ERP or data warehouse connected, the plugin can pull trial balances and subledger data itself. For the review method that should sit on top of any AI-drafted entry, see our guide to checking AI-drafted journal entries and accruals.

The Deal and Private Equity Skills

The second set lives in Anthropic's financial-services repository and is aimed at investment banking, equity research, private equity and fund administration. The core financial-analysis plugin covers comps, DCF, LBO and three-statement models, deck checks and Excel audits.

The private-equity plugin adds deal sourcing, screening, diligence checklists, returns analysis, IC memos, portfolio monitoring and value creation plans, with slash commands such as /ic-memo and /source. The repository also includes reference agents, among them a GL Reconciler that finds breaks and routes them for sign-off, and a Month-End Closer for accruals, roll-forwards and variance commentary.

For a worked example of the portfolio side, see our guide to Claude for PE portfolio reporting and IC memos.

Connectors: Live Data Instead of Pasted CSVs

Connectors use MCP, the Model Context Protocol, to let Claude read from other systems. The financial-services repository lists connectors for market data providers including S&P Global, FactSet, PitchBook, Morningstar, Moody's, LSEG and Daloopa, and for document stores including Box and Egnyte. Most of these need your own subscription with the provider.

For an in-house finance team, the more useful connections are usually closer to home: your ERP, your data warehouse, and the SharePoint or Google Drive folders where the close files live. The accounting plugin is built to use exactly those categories when they are connected. The practical gain is not speed so much as accuracy: no copy-paste step, so no pasted range that silently missed the last ten rows.

Making Them Work for a UK Finance Team

The accounting skills are written with US conventions: GAAP presentation and SOX 404 testing. The jobs are the same in the UK, so the method transfers, but three edits make a big difference:

• Standards and language. Point the skill at FRS 102 or IFRS formats and UK terminology, such as debtors, creditors and accruals as your team uses them.
• Your chart of accounts and thresholds. Add your nominal structure and materiality levels so it flags what your reviewers care about.
• Your house style. Paste one example of commentary or a reconciliation summary that your FD has signed off. One good example does more than a page of rules.

Because skills are readable files, these are edits a finance person can make. Keep the edited versions somewhere controlled, version them, and treat a change to a skill like a change to a procedure.

Which to Install First

For most finance teams, this order works:

1. The accounting plugin, starting with reconciliation and variance analysis on a month you have already closed.
2. Read-only connectors to the folders where your close files live, once the first results are trusted.
3. The deal skills, only if you work in banking, private equity or corporate development.

claude plugin marketplace add anthropics/knowledge-work-plugins
claude plugin install finance@knowledge-work-plugins

In Cowork, the same plugins install from Settings, under Plugins, without a command line. Whatever you install, run it on a closed month first and compare its output with what your team actually produced. That comparison tells you more than any demo.

Frequently Asked Questions

Our AI for Finance Leaders course teaches the method behind these skills, with the first two modules free. If you want them set up and adapted for your close, our AI consulting team does that, and our AI Opportunity Blueprint shows which finance processes to start with.