Finance teams have spent years caught between two imperfect options when it comes to analysis.
Stay inside the spreadsheets everyone knows, but sacrifice scale for flexibility. Or, move into rigid systems that improve control but slow down the day-to-day work people need to get done.
Now, AI is providing a third path.
With Anthropic’s integration of Claude directly into Excel, work that once took hours can happen in minutes. You can prompt your way through formula creation, clean data inconsistencies, summarize insights from data, format workbooks, and visualize information in seconds.
That shift is exciting, but it’s not the whole answer for improving finance processes.
AI is only as useful as the data it can access, the process it fits into, and the confidence finance leaders have in the output. If your numbers live across disconnected files, approvals happen outside of workflows, and no one can track changes. As a result, even if AI is helping your team work faster, those numbers will be hard to trust.
This is where Vena helps—picking up where AI leaves off. Because Vena is built natively in Microsoft Excel, finance teams can use Claude inside the spreadsheet environment they already rely on while staying connected to governed data, structured workflows, and a complete audit trail.
In this guide, we’ll show four practical ways to use Claude in Excel with Vena: from transaction matching and OpEx planning, to smarter modeling and faster board-ready reporting.
In these next four examples, we’ll show you how to combine the power of Vena and Claude directly in Excel to achieve faster analysis without abandoning control.
A big contributor to long monthly close cycles is the bank reconciliation process.
Reconciliations require you to compare general ledger entries, bank statements and transaction records across multiple sheets. Teams can lose hours handling many-to-one relationships, investigating variances, isolating unmatched items, and documenting conclusions for review purposes.
Using Claude in Excel alongside Vena helps you reduce that manual burden while keeping the process inside a controlled environment.
Here’s how:
Claude then creates a dedicated working sheet that organizes the matching logic, groups related transactions, calculates differences, and highlights items that still need attention.
You’ll instantly get outputs such as:
Because the work is completed right inside Excel, you can inspect formulas, follow the logic, and make edits in a format that’s familiar and easy to navigate. Because the workbook is connected to Vena, you can then save approved results back to the database. This means you retain the full file snapshot, including added sheets and supporting work, in the audit trail.
For leaner teams or organizations managing higher transaction volumes, this can compress days of repetitive reconciliation work into a faster, more manageable workflow, while preserving the governance standards finance depends on.
Getting a clear picture of operating expenses (OpEx) requires a lot of pre-work: building the model, finding missing forecasts, checking for outliers, and cleaning up the data before the business can plan against it.
Using Claude in Excel with Vena allows teams to move through that stage much faster.
A finance analyst can open a Vena-connected OpEx template in Excel, jump into the current year, and ask Claude to look for anomalies while adding comments directly into the workbook.
Within minutes, Claude will surface notable highs and lows, identify missing forecast data, and highlight spending patterns that deserve attention. With that context already in place, you can then move straight into planning for the next year.
From there, Claude can help build a plan for empty accounts in the upcoming year, populate values into the grid and explain the logic behind the suggested plan, so users have a clear starting point rather than a blank template.
You can also create Claude Skills to standardize how Claude formats Vena data when you build templates from scratch, thanks to Vena’s MCP server. This helps keep AI-assisted planning work aligned with the structure your finance team already uses.
Using Claude in Excel can also help tidy operational data issues that often slow teams down during planning, such as:
This changes the rhythm of planning work: teams spend less time locating issues and more time discussing tradeoffs and refining budgets with stakeholders.
And because everything happens inside a Vena-connected template, you can save approved changes directly back to the database, reflecting them back to your source of truth.
When you build a planning template, the first version is often only a shell.
The real work is adding the inputs, assumptions and logic that allow department leaders to submit forecasts accurately, and finance teams to consolidate them efficiently.
You can create a base template in Vena Template Studio using the dimensions of your choice from your data model, then open it in Excel to tailor it to a specific planning need. Claude can then help you turn that starting file into a usable input template—in minutes instead of hours.
Claude helps turn a Vena-generated revenue and cost template into a more usable planning model by adding drivers, dropdowns and logic directly in Excel.
For example, if you are planning bike sales revenue and cost of goods sold, you can enhance your template with external drivers by asking Claude to add common forecasting drivers such as seasonality, unit demand, or growth rates.
You can also prompt it to convert fields into drop-down lists and build formulas that spread a single driver amount across 12 planning months.
That can help you complete deep Excel work significantly faster, including:
Once finalized, you can add the template to a Vena workflow so that sales leaders, department heads, and budget owners automatically receive the correct file, complete their inputs, and submit plans through a structured approval process.
This is where Vena’s workflow automation strengthens the AI-assisted template build. Claude can help you create the model faster, while Vena helps route that model through the right people, steps and approvals once it’s ready to use.
In a P&L variance review, the numbers rarely tell the full story on their own. Leadership needs to know which changes are expected, which require action, and which assumptions need a closer look.
That context often sits inside Excel comments added by regional teams, department leaders, and finance partners throughout the reporting process.
For example, you may have comments indicating that New York needs additional budget for a new bike product launch, while Germany is seeing expense changes due to vendor consolidation.
At the same time, another comment may flag conflicting increases and decreases in phone and internet costs, while the UK shows a lower-than-average increase in employee wellness spend.
Reading every note, grouping similar themes, identifying contradictions and translating all of that into an executive-ready narrative can take substantial time.
With Claude in Excel and Vena, you can move through that stage much faster. Simply open a Vena-connected financial statement workbook in Excel and ask Claude to:
Claude can identify recurring comment patterns and produce a concise summary that helps you translate the numbers for leadership.
From there, you can move into PowerPoint. If your deck is managed through a Vena for PowerPoint connection, your charts and key performance indicators can already refresh from the latest source data when the file opens. Claude can then help turn the summarized commentary into new slides that match the style and structure of your existing presentation.
Claude summarizes comments from a Vena-connected financial statements workbook and turns them into PowerPoint-ready slides for leadership review.
These can include:
You still decide what issues you want to emphasize and what tone to use. Claude helps you get to a first draft faster, so your time can go toward stakeholder alignment and final polish.
When it comes to AI adoption, many finance teams focus heavily on prompt optimization, such as how to ask AI for a forecast or a cleaner formula.
That’s useful and worth learning, but it’s only the first layer of value to be gained from AI.
If you still need to copy AI outputs into separate files, manually review them via email, rebuild them into presentation decks, or reconcile them with source systems, your gains will remain small and fragmented. You may save minutes on a single task while still losing weeks across the full reporting or planning cycle.
This is how finance teams start getting real value from AI: by connecting those capabilities to data they trust and processes they can control.
Start with three practical questions:
The answers usually point to a shortlist: reconciliations, first-draft plans, commentary summaries, board materials, and management reporting.
From there, build one governed use case at a time. Define the prompt, the reviewer, the approval step, the source data, and where the final output should live. Teams that do this well often see faster cycles because they improve the system, not just the task.
Vena helps finance teams capture more value from Claude in Excel by consistently connecting results to workflows, controlled data, and enterprise reporting processes.
Want to learn more ways you can use Claude and Vena in Excel? Watch our webinar on demand.