Claude Skills vs. Projects vs. Artifacts: Complete Guide for Accounting Firms

Hey, I'm Isaac from Upstart.co, a consultancy that has helped over 100 accounting firms introduce AI and automation into their day-to-day work. And if your firm has rolled out Claude and nobody is actually sure when to use a skill, a project, an artifact, this is the one video for you to watch on the subject. People mix these 3 things all the time and pick the wrong tool for the job. So my hope is that by the end of this video, you'll know exactly which one to reach for and how to share each one across your team so everyone on your firm can put those tools to good use. Let's get into it. Skills, projects, and artifacts solve 3 different problems, but I want us to talk about the most powerful one first, which is skills. A skill is how your firm performs a particular task, but packaged in a way that Claude can apply consistently. Under the hood, what it actually is, is a folder with instructions. You can have like what's called MD files, just like file with a lot of text that explains how to do a thing, but it can also have scripts like actual code as well as reference files like spreadsheets, PDFs, documents that Claude loads when your request matches what the skill is for. Meaning you ask it to perform and to format a financial statement, and if you have a financial statement formatting skill, it will load those instructions, those scripts, and those files to know how to better perform that task. Now, what is it not? It's not an alert that fires when something lands on your inbox. It doesn't really have a way to be triggered automatically other than through the API. That's a topic for another day. But a skill is in essence how you do something applied automatically. It is available both in Cloud Chat, Cloud Cowork, and Cloud Code, and even on the API. Some of the examples that we've seen firms use skills for might be, hey, we have a client-ready financial statement formatting skill, we have a skill to create variance analysis for a daily sales reconciliation work paper that we have, we have a skill on how we brand our client deliverables, we have a skill on how we comment on a management account report and how we write the commentary to have an advisory conversation. We at Opsur use skills too, and one of the ones we love, it's an ad comparison skill that helps us help an accounting firm select which software app makes the most sense for them. As an example, I used it this morning, and this was a firm that was looking for a sales tax filing solution. As part of a community post, they posted that they were looking for a solution that was easy to use, and people chimed in with a couple of different options. I told this skill that I wanted to compare sales tax solutions for US-based companies and gave them 4 options. And what it does, it essentially gives me back the following. It tells me which one wins when. And in this case, it lists all the requirements people are usually looking for and tells me which is the app that wins in which cases. So for example, service model. Which of these companies have a fully done-for-you sales tax offering Which of them are self-serve software? Which one has an API? Which one don't? Which one track nexus and thresholds across nexus? Which one don't? Sometimes it's a tie. Sometimes there's a particular app that does it better than another. And of course, this is for us a baseline for us to do more research, but it can be a very helpful baseline from the perspective of even seeing, hey, vendor maturity. You have this app's been around for a long time, so you wouldn't pick an app that just goes to die the next year, and on and on. And as you saw, that was literally done with what seemingly is just one sentence, but it's because on the backend, there's many different examples of things we've done manually in the past and a series of steps that help Claude do it exactly the way we do it. For us, skills are the most powerful of the 3 concepts we're sharing today and the one we're betting on big time. We regularly recommend a skill as a way to automate a step within a process when we do our process audits. But in summary, it's essentially an SOP with examples and a way in which to tell Claude exactly how to do a task. Let's talk about projects. A project is almost like an isolated workspace that has a couple of characteristics. It has a project prompt, custom instructions. It has a set of files that you can attach that are permanent access. You can, like, as a knowledge base that every chat in that project can access. And you can also have the activity of the project. which is essentially a chat history of every chat we've had there. It is not a way to track tasks, even though a project would have you believe that. The name is a little tricky, but it's more of a way to hold context. The natural pattern for a firm is to use a project either per client or for a specific function. So, if you know already a specific client, you put in all the files there, all the financials for the last year, all their source documents, all their personal or business information so that now every chat there will have that context to do work. It is available within Claude Chat and within Claude Cowork as well. It is not available within Code at this point in time. From my perspective, it's my least favorite of the 3, and so much so that we don't even use it here at Opsur today. We might change our mind if it has additional features that leans, you know, makes us believe it's worth it, about, but we've just had ideas in the past of things we want to create a project for. And sometimes we do create a project for a client or recommend they perform a workflow in a project, but it's very, very rare. Within the Claude desktop app, if you use that, you should see projects right here within Claude and Cohort. It's actually the first thing that appears right after new task. And within projects, you should be able to see both your projects, projects you've created, projects your team has created, and things Projects that have been shared with you as well. In this case, just as an example, we wanted to utilize a project to create tasks for troubleshooting errors for engineering team. And this is another example that we use as a demo for a particular client. As I mentioned earlier, you have specific instructions, you have files that you wanted to reference for every chat, and then you have an activity or history. It's worth knowing that even though the memory, the instructions, and the files will be shared across team members, the individual chats remain private unless you share them individually. So that's worth knowing too. Now let's talk about artifacts. An artifact is an actual deliverable that Claude builds and usually does it in a panel right next to your chat so you can see it, use it, and even edit it live in some cases. This could be a formatted report, an Excel, an interactive cash flow dashboard, a calculator, or a mini application. It shows up right there in the chat when the output is substantial enough and is available both within Claude Chat, Claude Cowork, and just a week ago as of this recording in Claude Code as well. Let me show you 2 examples, a company one and a personal one. Artifacts are, it's actually how we build the first version of every dashboard we build at Opsa at the moment. We find it to be the best prototyping solution right now. And this is an example of a firm that wanted to report on cash received by partner with the data coming from Carbon and by month. So you can see here partners, you can see here months, and the idea is that at any point I can click on any of those boxes and see data coming from Carbon's time and billing and lists me which clients and which work items and which— what amounts add up to that cash received for that month for that partner, as well as the ability for me to export that file if I wanted to analyze it Further. Another example, it's a personal one for a grocery list creator that I built for my housekeeper. So it is in Spanish, as you'll see, but the idea is simple. These are all the items we buy on a regular basis in our house. We wanted our housekeeper to have a very simple way to tell us, go through the entire house, see what's not available. And here you can see that we have both the amount that we want Per item, the minimum we want, or the minimum below which she will say that there's not enough, so we purchase it, and when it is that we want to say yes to. And at the end, a simple way to say, cool, everything else is yes, and copy this so she can send that to us directly for us to either give her feedback on actually, or actually tell her to order the groceries then and there. I love artifacts. I think they're here to stay. And while project is kind of providing more context and skills also providing instructions, what I like about artifact is that it's a usable product. It's also worth knowing that neither concept we talked today is mutually exclusive. What does that mean? You can create a project that, and within that project, use a skill that produces an artifact. So all of these things can be really intertwined. Now, we always say that human adoption is the bottleneck in AI. So there are 2 things I want to dive into before I let you go. Which is shareability and triggers. How do you share this with others and how do you get them to use it? We already saw briefly in the project side how you can share it, but I do wanna share the same things about skills and artifacts. When you're using a skill and you go to Customize and Skills, you'll notice that there are, if you are on the Teams or Enterprise plan, the ability to have shared skill. The way this would look like is you'll either see who added the skill and will be able to turn it on and off, or if you were the one who created the skill, you'll be able to see all the details within it, which includes the file, as well as, as we had mentioned earlier, there might be scripts, there might be reference vocabularies, and there might be examples of assets that you've done in the past, files that you've performed or created in the past that you believe would be helpful for the skill to have available. As you can see here, I can share both with individual team members as well as everyone in your organization. In this case, this is something that I've shared with specifically our client managers at Opsur. Another thing that's worth knowing, highly underrated about skills, is that they're auto-triggered. What does that mean? Without me actually— I could if I wanted say slash and introduce something, but if I say help me compare Claude versus ChatGPT versus Copilot, it should understand by that that it is useful to use the app comparison skill. Prompt me to essentially check itself to know like how to use it. You can see here that it pulled specifically a product self-knowledge skill because I asked it about Claude, I asked it about itself, and that's a native skill. But it should— well, in this case, it might have gotten confused because it only pulled the product self-knowledge skill. It didn't put the app comparison skill. But I guess still worth knowing that it will pull skills without you actually telling it specifically which one. To use. Also worth knowing that skills are available both in chat, cowork, and code as well. As we saw earlier with projects, projects are available on chat and cowork. You can share them both with individual team members as well as everyone in your company. But the challenge is a project can't really be triggered. It's just one of the things we don't like. You have to work inside of the project and remember to go in there so you can actually make use of it. Last but not least, artifacts are actually shareable in a public format in the Personal plan specifically. So you saw that grocery shopping list thing? I have a public link available that our housekeeper can use. On the Teams and Enterprise plan, at this point in time, artifacts can only be shared internally with other teams. So as an example here, I should be able to share And anyone in our organization with the link can view this artifact. But otherwise, this is not a publicly available link and there's no good way to make this publicly available for anyone on the Teams Enterprise plan specifically. As a quick rule for you to remember, skill is how, a project is where, and an artifact is what. So skill is how you do it, the project is the context that you need to do it, and the artifact is the what or the final product. Now, The important distinction is that none of these things are event-driven automation. A human is still required to prompt it in either case. And that's the step where most adoption goes to die. And the firms that are saving the most hours right now are having agents and automations do things in the background. That's what I want to walk you through, 10 real automations that we actually get paid for as an agency so you can get your accounting firm to make work happen with little to no involvement. So you should see a video coming up in the screen right now. Watch that next, and until then, stay efficient.