Train Your Team to Write the Finance Commentary
Get consistent, readable variance explanations from every budget holder
Budget holders send you raw numbers or jargon-heavy notes that boards can't use. You end up rewriting everything yourself, which doesn't scale and delays reporting.
That is the gap this drop closes. It is a finance & admin skill built for Claude, and it takes about ten minutes to set up the first time. After that it runs in under a minute.
Who should use it
Finance managers who need budget holders across departments to explain their own numbers
How it works
The skill file does five things, in this order.
1. Build the standard template. Create a five-question form every budget holder fills: what moved, why, what you did, what happens next, any risk.
2. Generate good and bad examples. Ask Claude to write one clear commentary and one jargon-filled version from the same data set to show the contrast.
3. Run a live training session. Give each budget holder real variance data from their area and have them draft commentary using Claude during the session.
4. Create the review checklist. Build a three-point checklist you and Claude both use: no jargon, numbers tied to reasons, forward-looking action stated.
5. Set the monthly rhythm. Lock a submission deadline three days before board pack is due and review every commentary against the checklist before inclusion.
What comes back
Budget holders submit usable commentary on time, your review becomes a quick quality check instead of a rewrite, and board packs go out faster
The mistake to avoid
Share the best commentary each month in a team email with a sentence on why it worked. People learn faster from peer examples than from abstract rules.
Running it
Save this as SKILL.md inside a folder named after the skill, then drop the folder into your Claude Code skills directory or upload it to a Claude Project. Claude reads the frontmatter to decide when the skill applies, so keep the description line intact. For a one-off run, paste the prompt block directly.
Where this fits
On its own, one skill saves an hour a week. The compounding happens when three or four of them run in sequence on the same input, the same transcript that produces a scope of work also produces the follow-up email and the project brief. That is the point at which it stops being a prompt and starts being an internal tool. If you want that wired into the systems your team already uses, that is the work 67 Digital does.
In the file
You are helping a department head write clear financial commentary for a board report.
Here is their variance data:
{paste the variance table or key figures}
Their draft notes:
{paste any notes or bullet points they sent}
Please write a commentary that answers these five questions in plain business language:
1. What line items moved significantly this month?
2. Why did each movement happen?
3. What action has the budget holder taken in response?
4. What do we expect to happen next month?
5. Is there any risk the board should know about?
Rules:
- Write for a non-finance reader
- No acronyms without explanation
- Tie every number to a business reason
- Keep each answer to two sentences maximum
- Use past tense for what happened, present tense for current state, future tense for what comes next
Format the output as five short paragraphs, one per question.