The idea came from yesterday’s live session with Wouter Born and Paulo Tabarelli Batista.

Paulo Tabarelli Batista runs finance at RAR Holding in Dubai today, with the close and the board pack and the follow-ups that come with it. Over 15 years across multinationals, private equity-backed businesses, and family-owned groups. Transformations in FMCG, retail, e-commerce, telecom, and petrochemicals. Operations across five continents. Portfolios above $1B.

And Wouter Born is the author of the top finance newsletter AI CFO Office. He has spent the last 30 years at the intersection of finance, tech, and AI, helping CFOs move beyond spreadsheets to become AI-native key persons of influence. He’s also the founder of finstory.ai

You’ll get the full setup, the board pack (.skill), and all the prompts with files you can upload to Claude and build your own financial deck and impress your CEO.

Let’s dive in.

Building a storytelling financial deck with Claude

Step 1: Install the board pack skill

This skill is really advanced.

It has templates inside the skill with Python code files that know how to build the reporting model.

Download the skill below, then copy/paste the prompt to build a storytelling financial deck.

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You can close the books. The hard part is turning the numbers into a story the board actually understands, with every figure traceable back to a source.

That is what this session is about, and we are building it live in Claude.

How to build financial decks with Claude (LIVE)

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You can close the books. The hard part is turning the numbers into a story the board actually understands, with every figure traceable back to a source.

That is what this session is about, and we are building it live in Claude.

How to build financial decks with Claude (LIVE)

Paulo Tabarelli Batista runs finance at RAR Holding in Dubai today, with the close and the board pack and the follow-ups that come with it. Over 15 years across multinationals, private equity-backed businesses, and family-owned groups. Transformations in FMCG, retail, e-commerce, telecom, and petrochemicals. Operations across five continents. Portfolios above $1B.

He is not demonstrating a product.

He is showing you the environment he actually works in, including the parts that break.

Joost Vogelezang is a COO who has built, scaled, and exited operations across SaaS, finance, and tech for 30 years. He was a VP at insightsoftware, running a 250-person team across 30,000 customers and 20-plus acquisitions, and co-founded two SaaS companies, both of which exited.

What Paulo and Joost will cover

• Building financial decks with Claude.

• How to make your finance function AI-native

• What to deploy this quarter and what to wait on

• Where Claude saves real time and where it does not

• Skills for the workflows that compound every month

• Projects for persistent work with the right files in context

• Connectors for live data from your ERP, BI, and source systems

Who this is for

CFOs, VPs of Finance, FP&A leaders, controllers, and the operators who sit next to them. Anyone responsible for turning finance data into a story a board will act on.

What to expect

A live, hands-on session with Joost and Paulo building financial storytelling workflows in Claude in real time. Open Q&A throughout. Honest discussion of what works and what breaks.

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In nearly every conversation with finance teams, we heard the same sentence:

“If only this could plug directly into NetSuite and stay up to date.”

We agreed.

finstory now integrates directly with NetSuite, bringing your ERP data into finstory in near real time and turning it into structured financial narratives… without exports, spreadsheets, or manual prep.

With finstory you can connect to NetSuite and turn financial data into board-ready stories in 15 minutes. We aren’t replacing NetSuite. In fact, NetSuite remains the system of record.

And finstory becomes the storytelling layer around it.

• Every number traces to your ledger.

• Every annotation traces to your judgment captured in three questions per page.

• Every story is repeatable next month, sharper than the one before, because the corporate memory compounds.

The draft is written for you. Your team stays the author.

If you want to see what changes when your NetSuite data explains itself, we’ll walk you through it.

Please book your session by clicking here

But how it works… Your ERP stays the system of record

The design principle is simple.

NetSuite handles the data.

Finstory handles the story.

• A read-only connector retrieves the NetSuite data your team already trusts.

• finstory maps that data into your reporting structure.

• Your team adds judgment through short, structured questions.

• finstory turns the result into a board-ready financial story.

• Every figure remains traceable to the source.

Nothing is written back to NetSuite.

Your ERP stays the system of record.

Book a Netsuite Session

The Bottom Line

We believe every number in NetSuite already has a story.

Finance teams shouldn’t have to fight their tools to hear it.

With this integration, NetSuite remains your system of record. finstory becomes the system of insight. The data you trust turns into narratives you can actually use.

Day to day, not just at month-end.

We’re inviting a small group of NetSuite finance teams to participate. We handle onboarding, tailor the stories to your structure, and stay close as you use it in real situations.

The CFOs who learn skills, MCP servers, and storytelling-by-questions in 2026 will own the next 10 years of finance.

We connect to your live NetSuite. We bring the MCP server, the skills library, and the storytelling workflow. Your controllers learn it in one afternoon.

It’s also possible to add the finstory MCP connector in Claude.

If you want to see what changes when your NetSuite data explains itself, we’ll walk you through it.

Please book your session by clicking here

You’ll see how finstory works with NetSuite or in Claude

Let’s help finance turn numbers into stories.

And that’s all for today!

Book a Netsuite Session

Best regards,

Team at finstory

AI-native platform that turns financial data into board-ready stories.

Find us on LinkedIn | finstory.ai

You’re in NetSuite, late again, exporting reports into Excel.

The numbers are correct, but the story isn’t there yet. So you rebuild logic, check formulas, reconcile versions, and write commentary by hand.

If you’ve run finance on NetSuite, this feeling is familiar.

NetSuite records financial reality for 40,000+ companies.

But the problem starts when finance has to explain what changed and what to do next. NetSuite was built to record activity. It was not built to tell stories.

Saved searches pull data well, but they don’t surface insight.

Standard reports provide structure, not context. Finance teams compensate with Excel, manual workarounds, or custom IT reports. The result is slow, fragile reporting that arrives too late to drive action.

Over time, this creates a pattern… the data is trusted, but the explanation is rebuilt outside the system every single month.

Bring your ERP data into finstory without any manual work

In nearly every conversation with finance teams, we heard the same sentence:

“If only this could plug directly into NetSuite and stay up to date.”

We agreed.

finstory now integrates directly with NetSuite, bringing your ERP data into finstory in near real time and turning it into structured financial narratives… without exports, spreadsheets, or manual prep.

With finstory you can connect to NetSuite and turn financial data into board-ready stories in 15 minutes. We aren’t replacing NetSuite. In fact, NetSuite remains the system of record.

And finstory becomes the storytelling layer around it.

• Every number traces to your ledger.

• Every annotation traces to your judgment captured in three questions per page.

• Every story is repeatable next month, sharper than the one before, because the corporate memory compounds.

The draft is written for you. Your team stays the author.

If you want to see what changes when your NetSuite data explains itself, we’ll walk you through it.

Please book your session by clicking here

But how it works… Your ERP stays the system of record

The design principle is simple.

NetSuite handles the data.

Finstory handles the story.

• A read-only connector retrieves the NetSuite data your team already trusts.

• finstory maps that data into your reporting structure.

• Your team adds judgment through short, structured questions.

• finstory turns the result into a board-ready financial story.

• Every figure remains traceable to the source.

Nothing is written back to NetSuite.

Your ERP stays the system of record.

Book a Netsuite Session

The Bottom Line

We believe every number in NetSuite already has a story.

Finance teams shouldn’t have to fight their tools to hear it.

With this integration, NetSuite remains your system of record. finstory becomes the system of insight. The data you trust turns into narratives you can actually use.

Day to day, not just at month-end.

We’re inviting a small group of NetSuite finance teams to participate. We handle onboarding, tailor the stories to your structure, and stay close as you use it in real situations.

The CFOs who learn skills, MCP servers, and storytelling-by-questions in 2026 will own the next 10 years of finance.

We connect to your live NetSuite. We bring the MCP server, the skills library, and the storytelling workflow. Your controllers learn it in one afternoon.

It’s also possible to add the finstory MCP connector in Claude.

If you want to see what changes when your NetSuite data explains itself, we’ll walk you through it.

Please book your session by clicking here

You’ll see how finstory works with NetSuite or in Claude

Let’s help finance turn numbers into stories.

And that’s all for today!

Book a Netsuite Session

Best regards,

Team at finstory

AI-native platform that turns financial data into board-ready stories.

Find us on LinkedIn | finstory.ai

This week we asked a harder question.

Can the same bot build the financial model the board deck sits on?

A working 3-statement model. Assumptions. Scenarios.

Then a board pack that traces every claim back to those numbers.

We ran it on Born2Cycle again. Same company. Same May emails. Same inventory spike. By morning we had an Excel model, a six-slide board deck, and a short list of decisions the board still owns.

ChatGPT and Claude are still tools you operate.

Grok Bot is still a worker you delegate to.

The difference this week is the artifact. The bot did not only refresh commentary. It built the engine under the story.

Let’s dive in.

How to build a board model and deck as a CFO with Grok Bot

You do not prompt your way through a close.

You hand the bot a job with rules, source files, and a folder structure. You tell it what it must never invent. You review the output the way you review an FP&A analyst’s first draft.

The CFO moves from builder to approver.

From assembling the model to stress-testing the story.

Download the Skill files (try this yourself)

Download the zip. Open the Excel model. Open the HTML deck in your browser. Then run the steps below with Grok Bot. Everything you need is here:

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FP&A and Controllers can produce reports. You can close the books. The hard part is turning the numbers into a story the board actually understands, with every figure traceable back to a source.

That is what this session is about, and we are building it live in Claude.

How to build financial decks with Claude (LIVE)

Paulo Tabarelli Batista runs finance at RAR Holding in Dubai today, with the close and the board pack and the follow-ups that come with it. Over 15 years across multinationals, private equity-backed businesses, and family-owned groups. Transformations in FMCG, retail, e-commerce, telecom, and petrochemicals. Operations across five continents. Portfolios above $1B.

He is not demonstrating a product.

He is showing you the environment he actually works in, including the parts that break.

Joost Vogelezang is a COO who has built, scaled, and exited operations across SaaS, finance, and tech for 30 years. He was a VP at insightsoftware, running a 250-person team across 30,000 customers and 20-plus acquisitions, and co-founded two SaaS companies, both of which exited.

What Paulo and Joost will cover

• Building financial decks with Claude.

• How to make your finance function AI-native

• What to deploy this quarter and what to wait on

• Where Claude saves real time and where it does not

• Skills for the workflows that compound every month

• Projects for persistent work with the right files in context

• Connectors for live data from your ERP, BI, and source systems

Who this is for

CFOs, VPs of Finance, FP&A leaders, controllers, and the operators who sit next to them. Anyone responsible for turning finance data into a story a board will act on.

What to expect

A live, hands-on session with Joost and Paulo building financial storytelling workflows in Claude in real time. Open Q&A throughout. Honest discussion of what works and what breaks.

Paid monthly and annual members get the recap through the newsletter and the live recording. The live session and the recording are exclusive to Premium members.

If you want the live experience, upgrade to Premium Membership and register below.

Read more

Grok Bot is not a chatbot. Each bot gets a cloud computer.

It can sign into your favorite tools and do whatever a normal human does. It can log in to your Salesforce, click, navigate, and fill out forms. But it doesn’t shut down when you turn off your laptop. Instead, it keeps working for you.

SpaceX and xAI use Grok Bot internally.

You can give the CFO any finance tasks and personal tasks.

All you have to do is just describe the task.

Prompting is the worst way to use AI.

The best way to use AI is to delegate your work.

Elon has been tweeting about it nonstop. He told one user to connect it to his bank account and promised xAI would cover any mistakes.

That is a fundamentally different working model than anything we have tested before. ChatGPT and Claude are tools you operate. Grok Bot is a worker you delegate to.

Grok Bot can do something no AI tool has done for finance before.

You give it a job, connect it to your financial data and your email, and it runs on a schedule without you starting it.

Every night it reads new emails, pulls the latest numbers from your ERP, cross-references the two, updates your reporting deck where the evidence supports a change, and sends you questions where it does not have enough information to conclude on its own.

Let’s dive in.

Access to Grok Bot

Download the desktop app here: x.ai/bot

You’ll see 3 tiers.

Sign in with your account.

Setup takes less than 5 minutes.

On your top right you’d see an actual PC desktop you can open.

That’s where the bot lives, operates, and stores everything.

That’s how the bot works 24/7.

Let’s move on and build our first Autonomous Financial Reporting Analyst.

How to Build an Autonomous Financial Reporting Analyst (Bot)

Read more

But do they trust it? Nope, sorry.

Only your finance team trusts the forecast.

So why your CEO and the Board are skeptical.

The reason is simple.

Your data is a mess.

You don’t have a single source of truth.

It’s more like garbage in, garbage out.

We are live in uncertain times. Revenue is not cash.

The assumptions are lost. Scenarios are terrible. Your trail is weak. You can’t connect back to the real truth. When a number moves, you don’t know why it moved.

But you’re lucky.

We have Claude that we can use to figure it all out faster.

I used Claude to build a full 13-week cash flow forecast.

Do you know that you can keep the Excel model as the source of truth and yet build an interactive storytelling dashboard.

Every finance person must use Claude and make your life easier.

The great thing is you can stress-test.

It’s just not a pretty dashboard.

This is the dashboard that tells you the truth about your numbers.

While building this, I had a lot of fun… The dashboard gives you a complete overview of the weak spots. Exactly what a CFO need to see before making a hard call.

Okay, enough talking.

In today’s letter I’ll show you how to build the cash flow forecast with Claude.

I used the cash flow model builder skill (.md) and Cash flow scenario dashboard skill (.md)

You can download both of these skill files and all the prompts.

This is the real AI in finance work.

Let’s dive in.

How to build a full 13-week cash flow forecast with Claude

Step 1: Install the cash flow model builder skill

You’ll get 2 skills and test files.

1. Cash flow model builder skill

2. Cash flow scenario dashboard skill

Download the skills below, then copy/paste the prompt to build a cash flow model.

Read more

But it still runs on a spreadsheet someone built in 2019.

• Your planning tool exports to Excel.

• Your team edits the Excel.

• Someone uploads it back into the tool.

• Nobody knows which version is current.

• The assumptions live in someone’s head and the audit trail lives nowhere.

You are paying enterprise prices for a spreadsheet with a login screen.

So we asked ourselves a question.

What if we could build a working FP&A system using nothing but Claude, three downloadable Skills, and a simple Excel workbook?

Not a demo or a concept.

Something you can actually run on your own Marketing OPEX data this afternoon and walk away with a versioned, assumption-documented budget.

The interesting part is not the budget itself.

It is how Claude builds it. Instead of extrapolating last year’s numbers or blindly trending forward, Claude actually reasons about each account…

• is this headcount-driven, contractual, seasonal, discretionary? and asks you the planning questions a strong FP&A analyst would ask on their first day before it calculates a single number.

Read on.

Doing FP&A work with Claude

Step 1: Download the 3 FP&A skill files below

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Her team has access to the most advanced AI tools on the planet. They build them. They ship them. They sit in the same building as the engineers who make ChatGPT, Codex, and every model the rest of us pay to use.

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The answer is yes. And I’m going to show you exactly how.

I built a full monthly planning system for a real SaaS company inside Claude. A planning model with customer metrics, headcount planning, full financials, and a balance sheet.

Wait until you see the dashboard at the end. Because Claude handled the entire reforecast in the same Project, it had full context for every chart, every narrative, and every scenario. It’s the most comprehensive planning dashboard I’ve built so far

I took CoolDashboards, LLC monthly planning model, uploaded it to a Claude Project, and ran the full FP&A cycle. Actuals loaded. Forecast updated. Assumptions pressure-tested. Scenarios built. Dashboard created.

In today’s edition, you’ll see how to set up a Claude Project as your persistent FP&A workspace, load a real planning model and new actuals, spot anomalies against the plan, update the forecast, run scenarios with sensitivity analysis, and save the entire workflow so next month takes half the time.

No code, no API or any technical skills needed

Let’s dive in.

How to do financial modeling with Claude and build a storytelling board deck

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1. 95% of AI is dangerous

95% of AI projects don't deliver ROI. For every one success, 19 fail. Why? Because most companies stop at pilots. They build AI that works in a demo but breaks in the complexity of month-end closes, messy ERP data, and shifting definitions of KPIs. In finance, almost 'works' isn't good enough. If your AI can't handle exceptions, it can't survive.

2. The problem is the system design

CFOs understand controls, testing, and audits. Yet many treat AI like magic: one query in, perfect answer out. It doesn't work that way. The 5% who succeed build loops: AI generates, AI checks, AI tests, and humans sign off. Just like you'd never release financials without review, you can't deploy AI without system-level rigor.

3. Finance is where AI breaks fastest

In marketing, if AI gets it close, the copy still ships. In finance, if AI gets it close, you lose trust. Forecasts, reconciliations, and board packs demand repeatability. But generative AI is nondeterministic. It can give different answers every time. That's why projects fail. Unless you engineer consistency into the process, your finance AI fails on arrival.

4. The GenAI Divide is real

MIT calls it out: 95% stuck, 5% pulling away. The stuck companies keep buying static tools that don't learn or adapt. The winners build systems that plug into workflows, improve with feedback, and compound value over time. In finance, that divide shows up as cycle times, cost leverage, and strategic influence.

The question is simple: will your finance team be in the 95% or the 5%?

AI is not plug-and-play. It's infrastructure.

Treat it like you treat financial controls.

Read on to find out Why AI fails in finance?

Why AI fails in finance

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And for the first time in a while, we are not writing about incremental improvement. This is a genuine shift in what is possible for finance teams using AI.

It scored a 61 on the Artificial Analysis Int…

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That question forced an answer we had been circling for months.

Claude should not be your FP&A software. Claude should not touch your ERP. C…

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One found a material accounting anomaly on the first pass.

The other missed it entirely.

Same data, same question but different conclusions. And the difference was not cosmetic. It was the kind of difference that chang…

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It is 48 hours before the monthly review. The P&L looks fine. Ending cash is materially below forecast. Draft management commentary calls it “timing.”

You know it is not just timing.

You do not have 48 hours to prove it.

This is the workflow AI has been claiming to solve for 18 months. We finally tested it end-to-end this week with Anthropic’s newest model: Fable 5.

Fable 5 was released this month as a specialist reasoning model. Not the everyday workhorse. This is what you reach for when the problem is unfamiliar, the data is scattered, and the conclusion has to survive an audit committee.

Here is what you will get out of today’s letter:

• The exact three-prompt workflow that turned Fable 5 from an impressive CFO analyst into a reliable one

• Fixing broken month-end close with Mythos class model

• How to build a report for finance

• When to use Fable 5 versus Opus 4.8 in real finance work

• Every CFO must build skills in Claude

If you have ever watched an AI ship a beautiful analysis that fell apart the moment you audited it, the next 8 minutes are for you.

This is the finance-grade AI workflow nobody is talking about.

Let’s dive in.

How to fix a broken month-end close with Mythos Class Model

We built a demo assignment for Born2Cycle. Multi-location retail.

Real chart of accounts.

The data package was intentionally imperfect.

14 connected files. No single one explained the result.

• P&L and balance sheet

• 13-week cash forecast

• AR and AP aging

• Bank transactions

• Sales orders and channel performance

• Customer and vendor masters

• Inventory purchases and receipts

• Refunds, returns and chargebacks

• Payment-processor settlements

• Draft management commentary

That is a real month-end close package.

Fragmented, overlapping and some fields wrong.

Commentary that reads confident but does not stand up.

We opened Claude Cowork, pointed it at the folder, and selected Fable 5 with reasoning level set to High.

Fable 5 is Anthropic’s reasoning specialist.

Extra and Max reasoning modes exist, but Max burns tokens fast and slows the response. For a 14-file finance investigation, High is the sweet spot.

Enough depth to think, fast enough to iterate.

Download the Close Package files below and Copy/Paste prompt:

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For 30 years, finance software competed on one thing: features.

• More reports.

• More functions.

• Slicker dashboards.

• More buttons to click.

• That was the whole game.

Almost every vendor pitching you today is still playing it.

Whatever clever feature you pay for today, the next Claude release does it for free in three months. The models are …

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You are late again, exporting reports into Excel. The numbers are correct, but the story is not there yet. So you rebuild the logic, check the formulas, reconcile versions, and write the commentary by hand.

If you have run finance on any ERP, this feeling is familiar.

NetSuite, SAP, Oracle, Sage Intacct, Workday, Dynamics, QuickBoo…

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The paid section walks you through the full flow.

• The demo URL.

• The MCP connector setup in Claude.

• The finstory-story-builder skill file.

• The exact prompt to kick it off.

• The three rounds of questions and answers.

• The finished, published board story you can share with your team.

15 minutes from blank chat to board-ready story. Built with your hands. Your judgment. Our framework. By the end you will have one question.

How do I do this with my own NetSuite data?

If you have been waiting for the right moment to bring this stack into your own finance function, this is it.

Step 1: Open the finstory demo

Before we start the storytelling process, take a look at the Born2Cycle demo application of finstory:

Copy/Paste Demo URL below

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