Build your finance plugin: stop re-explaining your chart of accounts to AI

If you’ve tried using AI for finance work, you know the frustration. Every new conversation starts from scratch. Here’s my chart of accounts. Here’s my expense categories. Here’s how I format numbers. Here’s what my fiscal year looks like. You do that five times in a week and you think: there must be a better way.

There is. In Claude Cowork you can package all of that, your context, your accounts, your workflows, into a plugin with slash commands. Type /my-reconciliation and it runs your reconciliation, your way, every time. I made a video showing exactly how I do it, including the template I use, and I’m giving that template away below.

Why I built a template for this

I’ve been building finance workflows in Claude Code and other tools for months. They work, but they need configuration and setup. Cowork takes a different approach: you describe your process in plain English and it builds the workflow for you.

The catch is what happens when you describe your process from memory. I kept forgetting things. I’d set up a reconciliation workflow and realize I never included the tolerance rules. I’d build a close checklist and leave out the variance thresholds. So I made myself a guided prompt: a fill-in-the-brackets template that walks through everything a finance plugin needs, so nothing gets left out. I’ve been testing it for a while now, with my own work and with clients, and it just works. So I’m sharing it.

What’s inside the template

It’s organized in sections, and each bracket is a placeholder for your information.

Your role and context. Industry, company size, tools, fiscal year, currency, number formats. Everything the plugin does will reference this, which is exactly why you’ll never have to explain it again.

Your chart of accounts and expense categories. If you use 1000-2999 for assets and 4000s for revenue, it goes here. The more specific you are, the better the plugin performs.

Eight workflow templates. Bank reconciliation, monthly close, variance analysis, cash flow forecasting, invoice processing, financial statements, tax prep, and budget building. They’re deliberately generic so you can adapt them, which is what I do with every client: keep what applies, delete the rest, change the rules to yours. The reconciliation one, for example, tells the AI step by step how to match by amount, date within a tolerance window, and vendor, what to flag, and how to summarize. Your tolerances, your matching rules, your output format.

Safety rules, built in. Never auto-send or auto-post anything. Uncertain items get flagged. Every output stays a draft until you sign off. Human in the loop, always. I won’t ship a finance workflow without these lines, and I’d suggest you don’t either.

From template to working plugin in minutes

The mechanics are almost anticlimactic. Fill in the brackets. Copy the whole thing. In Cowork, click the plus, choose create with Claude, paste, and go. You get a zip file back, upload it, and the plugin is installed with all your slash commands listed. In the video I run my three-statement build command and watch it produce the income statement, balance sheet, and cash flow in exactly the format I specified, with the checks I demanded. Then you iterate: every time you run a workflow, you make the plugin a little better.

Process first, tool second

One thing before you build anything. If you can’t describe your process clearly to an AI, you probably can’t describe it to a new hire either. The plugin just forces you to write it down, and that exercise makes you better at your job whether you use AI or not.

And if your company hasn’t figured AI out yet, locked into other tools, still in the “we’ll get to it eventually” phase, don’t wait for them. This space is moving fast. When your company finally does figure it out, they’ll look around the room and ask who already knows how to do this. Be that person. Practice on fake data on your own time if you have to. The people who start now will be leading those conversations later, not sitting through them.

Get the Plugin Maker

The download below is the exact guided template from the video: role and context, chart of accounts, the eight workflow templates, and the safety rules, all ready to fill in and paste into Cowork. Free, like I promised. Start with the workflow that annoys you most.