Free starter kit from airCFO
Build your finance brain.
Most finance teams use AI one chat at a time: paste the chart of accounts, explain the policy again, start over next month. This kit gives Claude a handbook it reads every session, skills anyone on your team can run to get the same workpaper, and a review step so nothing Claude prepares hits the books until someone else approves it. One folder. Plain markdown. Yours to keep.
From The Startup Operator's Playbook for AI in Finance, a live session on October 28, 2026. Built by airCFO, the finance and accounting team behind 300+ venture-backed startups.
What’s in the folder
Context
CLAUDE.md and a handbook/ of eight pages: company overview, chart of accounts, accounting policies, close process, cash, metrics and reporting, systems, and the workpaper standard. Written once, read automatically every session.
Skills
One Claude skill per recurring task, each in its own folder. A setup skill that builds your handbook, a level-up coach that brings your team along, plus worked examples for prepaid amortization, a usage accrual, and a bank reconciliation.
Review
New skills save to testing/ until they match a known-good result. Every workpaper carries a balance check and a sign-off block. The person who ran it never approves it.
Start where you are
The kit follows the five-rung ladder for AI in finance. Find your rung and start there, or say “help me level up” and the kit’s level-up skill works it out with you.
| Rung | What it looks like | Start with |
|---|---|---|
| 0 · Chat | Asking Claude questions one at a time | new-skill skill |
| 1 · Skills | A monthly task Claude can repeat on demand | new-skill skill |
| 2 · Clean, connected data | Claude reads your systems, and the inputs look the same every month | handbook/systems-and-data.md |
| 3 · Shared context & workflows | One place your policies and processes live | setup-finance-brain skill |
| 4 · Finance engineering | Version control and review before anything hits the books | The level-up skill’s GitHub and Claude Code setup |
| 5 · The frontier | New work finance couldn’t do before | Everything above, running |
Bring your team along
Most finance teams don’t start out comfortable with AI tools, and that’s fine. Say “help me level up” in the kit’s folder and the level-up skill coaches the team one rung at a time:
- Checks where you are with five plain questions, and places the team on the ladder.
- Plans the next one or two moves and does the first one with you, explaining every term and checking each step before the next.
- Sets up review, step by step. When the team is ready for rung 4, it walks a champion through installing Git, Node.js, Python, VS Code, and Claude Code, putting the Finance Brain in a private GitHub repository, and turning on review so every change to a skill or policy is approved by someone other than its author. Then it onboards each teammate.
- Remembers progress. Your rung, last step, next step, and recent wins live in
CLAUDE.md, so every session picks up where the last one stopped.
Get started in Claude Cowork
- Download the kit and unzip it somewhere permanent, for example
Documents/Finance Brain. - Add the folder in Cowork with Work in a folder. Cowork reads
CLAUDE.mdautomatically. - Pick a path:
- 30 minutes: “Use the
new-skillskill. I want to automate [one rec or JE you know cold].” Claude rebuilds last month’s version, compares it to the real one until it matches, and saves the method as a new skill. - An afternoon: “Use the
setup-finance-brainskill.” Claude drafts every handbook page from your docs and any connected systems, asks you only what they couldn’t answer, then runs a short follow-up with whoever owns the numbers. - This month: run the worked examples on your own books, add your recurring tasks, and publish the handbook as an internal website (say “publish the handbook”).
- 30 minutes: “Use the
Using Claude Code instead? Open the folder as a project and link skills/ as .claude/skills so Claude Code runs the same files you edit. The full instructions are in the kit’s README.
Ground rules baked in
- Read-only. Skills read your systems and prepare workpapers. A person posts.
- Placeholder, never guess. Anything Claude doesn’t know is marked
[PLACEHOLDER: ...]and listed as an open question with an owner. - The author is never the approver.
- Fix the method, not the output. When a reviewer catches something, the skill changes so next month is right too.
See it finished
The example handbook is this kit filled in for Honestly Just Spreadsheets, Inc., a fictional Series A company, and published with the kit’s own publish step. The kit also includes a finished, synthetic usage-accrual workpaper in examples/workpapers/.
Nothing in the kit is accounting, tax, or legal advice. Your policies are yours to set with your team and advisors. Unofficial: not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Anthropic, Intuit, Oracle, or any other vendor named here. MIT license. Questions or feedback: alex@aircfo.com. More playbooks ship in The AI CFO newsletter.