In this tutorial, Isaac from Opsa.co demonstrates how accounting firms can leverage Anthropic Claude’s new “skills” feature to automate and enhance financial and operational workflows. He first explains what Claude skills are—a built‑in, reusable prompt that can be invoked in chat or call work—and shows how to create a custom skill using the Claw interface, walking through a website‑critique example. Isaac then explores the pre‑installed skill plugins that Anthropic provides (Finance, Data, Operations), testing the Finance skill to generate an income statement from a general‑ledger report, and the Data skill to build an interactive financial dashboard. He combines these skills, showing how the dashboard visualizes revenue, expenses, gross profit, and net income trends. Next, he introduces an Operations skill for capacity planning, feeding it internal project‑and‑resource data to merge operational metrics with the financial dashboard, revealing insights such as utilization, revenue per hour, and gaps between capacity and revenue. Throughout, he notes successes, occasional inaccuracies, and error handling, and concludes by inviting viewers to explore additional AI tools for accountants.
Chapters
Hey, this is Isaac from Opsa.co, where we help accounting firms support more revenue without adding headcount or expensive software. And in this video, I want to walk you through the basics of Claude skills. What are Claude skills and what should you be using them for, if at all, for your accounting firm? Let's get to it. So first, what are Claude skills? Claude skills are a newer feature that you now have available on both Chat and Call Work to be able to customize the output. Of your results in the chat. It has 2 benefits. One, it allows you to easily call that skill when you are in the chat, as we'll see in a second. And 2, it is essentially a built-in prompt. That's really what it is. It's a text, a set of instructions that you already have almost like pre-built and that you can easily call. Just as an example, I have an MCP Builder skill. I could come in at any point, say /MCP, and it will have already that whole set of instructions that I've written within that skill. As its name suggests, you would give Claude a specific skill, an ability to do something very well and be able to call that on demand. Now, how do you create one skill? If you have Claude on your desktop application, both in the chat and the Upwork face or chat or cowork interface, you should be able to see this customize button and this skills optional option as well as the ability to add one. If I wanted to add one, you'll notice that I can both write it myself, upload a skill, or create it with Claw. Let's actually try to create one with Claw and see what that looks like. Let's just say I want the skill to critique a website or landing page given a link. That's, let's just say that that's what I want. I'll just simply tell it here. I'll be using, in this case, a, I'll be using a voice-to-text app to talk with AI and be able to get this done. I wanna build this skill where provided a link to a website, you give me a detailed critique of how it could be better acting as a marketing strategist and master. Let's just say that that's what we have. I just ask it to do that and it has the built-in ability to know, okay, given this that the user has asked for, I know that I have to create a skill. You can see that it's still actually using the skilled creator skill, which is a little bit of a, of a meta skill in order to create that. And in a few seconds, in a few minutes, we should be able to see that come back. You'll notice that this is something I like a lot and something I encourage from Claude is that it's gonna ask me some questions for me to tell it in a little bit more detail. What specifically do I want? What should the output be? Oh, your meaning of the critique. Let's just say the chat response. What areas should we critique? Let's just critique everything. Should the critique include rewritten copy suggestions or just identify issues? Let's just say just identify the issues for now. So through asking myself clarifying questions, it will have a better sense of what to do. As I mentioned earlier though, ultimately a skill, it's a prompt. So don't fool yourself thinking this is much more than that, at least at this point. At the end, we'll be able to go back and see that skill it created. What's the prompt underneath it? Okay. So after some back and forth, essentially we have our skill that I can go ahead and save. As I mentioned earlier, it's really a prompt. Underneath, but it sometimes has specific tools that we'll be able to pull from or know that it has to use. So that can be very helpful so that now when I want a critique, I just say website critique. I just drop a website and that's it. Now, I also want us to test some of the existing skills that Anthropic Claude's creator or company provides by default, including the finance, the data, and the operation. Plugins that they have available. So as mentioned, you have some plugins already available, and by default, you have a few that are almost like departments, right? You have finance, you have operations, you have data, design, marketing, legal, sales, and so on. And these have been provided by Claude as a set of skills that you can just download and install into your Claude instance. In this case, we have data, operations, and finance, and I want to be testing all 3 today. First, I wanna open up the skills within finance and specifically I want to create, let's take a look at income statements. So let's try that in our chat by clicking these 3 dots and click try in chat. You'll see that it has again dash and the name of the skills as a starting point. And I'll just say, hey, generate financial statements based on my general ledger detail report below. Then tell me that that's it. It is. That's what we have. And this happens to be something that I'd like to do personally for our own finances. So this is our own personal information. This is not our client's information, just in case. And I'm just gonna drop it and let it run. In the meantime, let's take a look at other skills I'd like to try as well. One of the ones I'm actually super curious about, it's in this data section. It's able to build an interactive dashboard from my data. So perhaps this would be a good one to actually add on top of this one that's running right now to see what dashboard it can can come up with, with our financial data specifically. Let's waste some time to see what it comes up with for the financial statements skill specifically, and then we'll test the dashboard building abilities. Okay, so it was struggling actually to come up with a financial statement. So let's actually narrow down the scope of what it does to be the income statement only and see if it has an easier time. I probably didn't let it run long enough, but I have only so much time to record this video. So let's let it run with income statement and see what it can come up with. All right, so with the general ledger, it was actually able to pull Um, a series of actually pretty good Excel, I would suggest, around revenue levels month to month, expenses, cost of goods sold, gross profit. Like, not bad, I'd say. Um, and actually, I don't know if all of those transactions are categorized, so it might have categorized some of them. Um, and it has some things to say about, you know, professional fees spiked, paid a lot of money to several consultants for a particular month. I know that's true. So if you're kind of being able to effectively create the income statement from somewhat raw data, and actually I've seen it done it from like bank statements, so it could be even rawer than a general ledger from that perspective. Now, one of the beautiful things about skills is you can combine skills just like a human would combine skills. And let's just say that, hey, I don't actually want just an Excel. I want a beautiful dashboard that my clients can interact with or that my leadership team can interact with. So I'm gonna be using the build dashboard skill that's already part of the data plugin and tell it to, hey Claude, can you please off of those, those the data points that you've been able to get, create as interactive and intuitive of a dashboard that would allow me to see the insights from the data we've captured such that I can make decisions for the future of my business. Let's just say that that's what we have. Let's put this here and you'll see that now we have On the same chat, multiple skills combined. And I'll skip through the, uh, when the dashboard is done because it's probably gonna take a while. All right, so actually now the Claude's been able to build a dashboard, a relatively good dashboard here for me to be able to visualize. Oh my God, that drop was huge. I don't think that's entirely accurate. Oh, that's net income. That's why that makes sense. Actually, that's pretty insightful to see like how net income has changed over the years. I didn't realize we had that drop in that particular month, although I recall that particular month now. So yeah, it's actually very interesting to see what is our sales and marketing, what is our general administrative, how has our gross margin been relatively healthy and maintained over time, but has our net margin actually fluctuated a little bit more than I'd like to admit. So there you have it, a simple dashboard in order to kind of have some Uh, data from our financials. Now I do wanna test another operational skill that it is capacity planning. It's incredibly important as you grow a company, you're growing revenue, making sure that you're hiring the capacity to support that revenue for your clients without dropping the service quality. And it's something that I've, uh, tried a lot. And actually I have built a custom tool internally for our team that allows us to plan capacity across different roles, across different projects, allow us to see how does our current capacity compares to the active work, who that work is assigned to, and then each at its individual basis who might be over or overloaded at any given time. And I happen to build a little bit of an export tool for that app that gives me all that data condensed so that I can share it with AI, which is what I want to try to do next. Given that I have the, some of the capacity planning data that we use with that tool. And now that it knows about my financials, I'm curious what it might be able to tell me and how it can perhaps improve the current dashboard that it has knowing our financial performance. So I'm going to ask it. Now that you know our financial performance, I've just copied here a file that has a lot of our capacity data and project data. Could you now incorporate and find a useful and insightful way to incorporate that data into, or into the dashboard you just built and give me insights into whether there's a gap between our financial data and operational data and what we can do about it. Let's say that's what we have. Again, as usual, we'll have to wait some time for this to run, but I'm curious to see what it can come up with. All right, so we have our dashboard back and let's take a quick look at what it might have come up with, like team size. Okay. Active projects. Current average hourly rate versus my target. That's a little painful to look at. Capacity versus utilization. Interesting. Revenue per hour. Cox payroll per hour. I mean, this is helpful. I mean, we don't have significant income beyond our services, so that's not as helpful. Looks like it was trying to come up with something here, but it failed to do so because I see an error. But I like that it merged some of our time and revenue data without me asking, and it was able to shout that out. Delivered utility. Organization proxy, team size versus active projects. Looks like just-in-time, which is helpful to see. Uh, DL revenue versus plan MRR, delivery capacity versus revenue per month. Honestly, pretty insightful things from all I can tell. And that's just an introduction of what CloudSkills can do for you. If you're curious to see what other AI tools companies are using today to streamline their firm, feel free to check out this next video on Top 10 AI Tools Accountants Are Raving About. And with that, uh, I'll let you go. I'll see you on the next one, and until then, stay efficient.
