Most finance teams use Excel to prepare numbers.
Then they open PowerPoint and try to turn those numbers into a story.
That separation is where friction starts.
We just tested something different. We kept the model in Excel, and used Claude (Opus 4.6 with extended thinking) as an FP&A partner through the web client. The goal wasn’t slides. The goal was the board narrative before formatting.
The important lesson came quickly.
If you upload a model and ask an LLM to analyze this, it will guess. It will fill gaps with assumptions. It will produce commentary that sounds confident but isn’t anchored in the real pressure points of the business.
That’s where hallucinations happen.
So we changed the sequence.
First, we gave full company context, business model, seasonality, strategic priorities, cash pressure, board focus. Then we asked the model to propose CFO-level questions before doing any analysis. That intermediate step matters more than the charts.
The AI surfaced questions around cash discipline, margin volatility, working capital strain, and store ramp performance. We answered those questions in the workbook itself. Only after that did we ask it to propose a storyline.
That storyline became the backbone of the deck.
Today, you’ll see how to use Claude to turn messy data into board-ready narrative.
Let’s dive in.
Here’s the exact workflow, with the two prompts and the file steps.
How To Run Claude For Financial Storytelling (board deck workflow)
Slide 1 framed the quarter clearly: growth is real, EBITDA expanded, but margin quality is volatile and cash tightened.
Slide 8 pulled the logic together: pause expansion, protect working capital, enforce discount discipline, and avoid drawing the revolver unless necessary.
Instead of Excel being a reporting file and PowerPoint being a storytelling layer, the thinking now happens inside the model. The AI forces clarity before formatting.
I’ll show you exactly how you can achieve this with the PROMPT I’ll share and tell you what files to upload so you can give it a try.