The CFO Skill.md every CFO must install
Make Claude your personal CFO. Then use it for the questions you can't ask anyone but Claude.
Every CFO I talk to runs into the same frustration.
Sunday night. The board meeting is Tuesday and the section on Q1 weakness is still half-built. The FP&A director who could help is at her son’s recital. The controller went offline at 7pm. The CEO is not the person to ask. He’s the subject of three of the slides.
Thursday before the audit committee meeting. The committee chair wants you to walk through the labor productivity story by store cohort. You have the data in three different files. None of them roll up cleanly. Your peer CFO is on a flight. Your finance partner at the PE firm doesn’t pick up after 9pm.
This is where the CFO job actually lives. Not in the analyst calls. Not in the operating reviews. In the 11pm decisions, nobody trains you for and nobody is available to help you make.
As a CFO you read the deck. You think about who’s in the room. You list a few topics. You hope you’re close. You walk in and discover the directors with the sharpest questions are the ones you didn’t prepare for.
I built something for those moments.
A Claude skill called The CFO Board Prep SKILL.md
Install it once. Open Claude. Ask it anything a finance leader might ask before a board meeting. It responds like a seasoned Fortune 500 CFO would.
It pushes back when the framing is wrong. It asks for context when context is missing. It gives a direct recommendation when the clock is ticking.
Let me show you exactly how to install it and walk through the real use case
Let’s dive in.
Step 1: Create the project in Claude
Go to claude.ai. Click Projects in the left sidebar.
Click New project. Name it CFO Board Prep.
In the project description, paste this:
I'm a CFO. I need a strategic thought partner who thinks like a
seasoned Fortune 500 CFO. Use the CFO Board Prep skill file in
this project's knowledge to respond to my questions, analyze my
data, and push back on my framing when I'm solving the wrong
problem.Upload the SKILL.md file in the Files section.