copy, paste, done

Skills Library

Ready-made instructions your AI assistant can run

Each skill below is a ready-made set of instructions for one common finance task.

To try one: open it, copy the whole page, and paste it into Claude or ChatGPT together with your file (remove anything confidential first). The AI does the work; you review what comes back. Every skill ends with the checks that prove the output ties.

Every skill has the same simple shape: when to use it, what it needs, the steps, and the checks. Read one like a recipe even if you never hand it to an AI.

Cleaning messy exports

Clean credit/debit amounts 01 Turn 1,234.56- and 1,234CR into clean numerics that tie out

Normalize vendor & account names 02 Standardize case, whitespace, punctuation, and known aliases

Parse legacy system reports 03 Extract clean tables from text-dump exports with repeated headers

Flag duplicate transactions 04 Find every record in a duplicate group without deleting evidence

Matching and reconciliation

Tolerance date matching 05 Match records when dates are close but not exact (merge_asof)

Safe Excel-to-SQL merges 06 Join spreadsheet and database data without silent row loss

Master-data mapping 07 Apply account classifications and department mappings with exception lists

Replace nested IFs with rules 08 Turn 12-level IF formulas into readable, testable classification logic

Summaries, periods, and reshaping

Fiscal period calculations 09 Government fiscal years and quarters computed once, reused everywhere

Group comparisons with transform 10 Compare each row to its group total without losing detail rows

Reshape with melt & pivot 11 Move between wide report layouts and tall analysis layouts

Multi-year consolidation 12 Stack yearly files with different columns into one reviewable set

The five-step habit

  1. Pick the skill that matches your task, and glance at its checks first.
  2. Copy the whole skill and paste it into Claude or ChatGPT — or, if you use a coding agent, save it into its skills folder (Tutorial 2 shows how).
  3. Attach your file and name the skill: “Use the clean-credit-debit-amounts skill on this export.”
  4. Review like a preparer’s work: the checks first, then the exception list, then spot-check detail.
  5. Improve and share: post what broke in the Discord #skills channel.

Each step above is walked through click-by-click in the Tutorials — including using skills without a terminal, and organizing them into an Obsidian-style knowledge vault. New to the concepts? Start with the AI Field Kit.

Tried one? Tell me. Missing one? Ask.

The library grows from real use. If you ran a skill, I want to know how it went — the tie-out, the exceptions, the weird thing the agent did. And if you have a manual process that deserves to become a skill, describe it and I’ll build it.

More resources

  • Recipes — classic copy-paste code, no agent required
  • Cheat sheet — quick pandas reference
  • Analytics map — the thinking behind every skill: source, rule, exception, review