This course contains the use of artificial intelligence.

Most finance teams already tried an AI tool. They got back a beautifully written answer with a wrong number buried in it, somebody senior spotted it, and the whole thing quietly went back in the drawer.

That is the right instinct and the wrong conclusion. The problem was never the writing. The problem was that nobody had a method for checking it.

This course is that method — the grounding, the verification and the paper trail that let you put your name on the output. Get that right and the speed follows on its own. Skip it, and the speed is worthless, because you cannot sign your name to anything.

What makes this course different

Number integrity is a subject, not a disclaimer. Fabrication, silent arithmetic and definitional drift are taught as first-class hazards with named mitigations. Every lecture that produces a number ends on the tie-out step.
The whole surface area, not just the chat box. Projects, Agent Skills, connectors and MCP, Cowork, Claude Code, and the ten published finance agent templates — because recurring-task automation lives in those surfaces, not in a chat window.
A control-and-audit spine. Segregation of duties when the preparer is a machine, SOX-relevant boundaries in the close, and exactly what internal audit will open with.

What you will build

You follow one company — Vantera Health, a listed medical devices business with a 64-person finance function, an eight-day close it needs to get to three, an acquisition closing mid-year and an activist investor asking about segment margin. Every technique is applied against one consistent set of facts.

Across six hands-on labs you produce a reusable analytical prompt with a verification pass; a grounded Claude Project; a complete month-end variance pack where every figure traces to a source cell; a reusable close Skill run twice to prove it repeats; a valuation with a full assumption log, three scenarios and the covenant cliff; and a reconciliation agent with a human approval gate, tested by trying to break it.

Requirements

No AI background and no coding. A free Claude account is enough to follow most of the course. Sections 5 and 6 reference Claude for Excel, which needs a paid Claude plan and Microsoft 365 on desktop — a chat-window fallback path is given for every Excel-dependent workflow, so you can complete the course without either.