For 40 years, CFOs lived in Excel hell.
Formulas breaking at 2 a.m.
Every model started in chaos.
Links pointing to dead sheets.
Scenarios rebuilt from scratch every month.
But Anthropic Claude changes everything.
For the first time, Excel can actually think with you.
Claude can now generate real Excel models.
Not hard-coded outputs, not throwaway tables, but fully traceable, auditable, and reusable spreadsheets.
Type your business logic in plain English, and in minutes you get:
Formulas you can audit line by line.
Models that update month after month.
Driver-based forecasts with adjustable parameters.
This is not incremental. It is the difference between Excel being a static calculator and Excel becoming a reasoning partner.
FP&A teams must stop spending days grinding models that are outdated the moment they ship. Claude makes them reusable, expandable, and simulation-ready.
Most AI outputs are unusable in finance:
Confidential data feels unsafe in the cloud.
Other tools hallucinate data, forcing you to rebuild from scratch.
ChatGPT produces numbers but hard-codes every cell. No traceability. No inputs.
Claude solves all of this:
Reusable: Extend the same model over time.
Auditable: Formulas and inputs you can verify.
Safe: Build with dummy data, then paste in actuals locally.
Complex: Handles real-world finance complexity, not toy examples.
This is why CFOs must care.
It is not a productivity hack.
This is the first time Excel can truly think with you.
In today’s edition I’ll show you how AI can understand existing models and make changes and even find errors. We’ll use Claude to make changes to an existing FP&A model natively inside Excel.
This is just the beginning of AI doing real-world tasks in finance.
Let’s dive in.
How To Change FP&A Model in Excel with AI
Imagine you have a working model. It is fragile. Held together by yellow input cells, copy-paste patches, and late-night duct tape.
Now your CEO walks in and says:
Can we see the impact of Non-HR OPEX shifting 3% each month? Keep HR costs untouched. Update EBITDA, cash, and the charts. And don’t break the layout.
Every FP&A analyst knows what happens next:
Breaking links that once worked.
Charts that suddenly stop updating.
Hours lost tracing formulas through a maze of tabs.
Stress testing the model line by line just to make sure nothing silently blew up.
This is Excel hell.
And it has defined finance for 40 years.
But here is the breakthrough.
Claude can now understand your existing model, make precise changes, and keep it intact with a single prompt.
This is huge and a real breakthrough in finance.