For business owners
Best Skills for monthly reports and spreadsheets
For the monthly numbers the best Skill is xlsx: it builds real spreadsheets with working formulas, formatting, and charts, so the figures you present trace back to a model rather than to a number typed into a slide. performance-report structures the marketing side into metrics, trends, wins, misses, and prioritized fixes; pdf pulls figures out of the statements and invoices you were sent; pptx turns the result into the deck you present.
All four are Anthropic-published, MIT-licensed, and verified on Claude.ai. Note what this set is not: bookkeeping software. It reports on numbers you supply — see the limits.
Updated August 26, 2026 · first published August 26, 2026
Top pick
xlsxBuilds real spreadsheets — working formulas, formatting, charts — so the figures you present trace back to a model an accountant or investor can open and interrogate, rather than to a number typed onto a slide.
You get: An .xlsx file with live formulas and charts.
Ranked
The shortlist
Every Skill below is catalogued with verified Claude.ai compatibility, so each one installs through the browser with no terminal. Ranked by fit for the common case — open a skill page for its composite score, license, and install commands for other agents.
| Skill | Source | What you get | Best when |
|---|---|---|---|
| xlsx | Official | An .xlsx file with live formulas and charts. | The monthly numbers, a financial model, or any report that needs arithmetic that holds up. |
| performance-report | Official | A performance report with trends and ranked next actions. | Wrapping a campaign, or preparing the weekly, monthly, or quarterly channel summary. |
| Official | Extracted text and tables, ready to go into the model. | The inputs arrived as PDFs and retyping them is both slow and where errors enter. | |
| pptx | Official | A .pptx deck you download and present. | You present the report to a board, an investor, or the team. |
All Skills that run without a terminal are listed together in one collection.
Why these
Pick by pick
- 1xlsx
Builds real spreadsheets — working formulas, formatting, charts — so the figures you present trace back to a model an accountant or investor can open and interrogate, rather than to a number typed onto a slide.
Best when: The monthly numbers, a financial model, or any report that needs arithmetic that holds up.
- 2performance-report
Structures the marketing side of the month into key metrics, trend analysis, wins and misses, and prioritized optimization recommendations — the report format that ends in decisions instead of a dashboard screenshot.
Best when: Wrapping a campaign, or preparing the weekly, monthly, or quarterly channel summary.
- 3pdf
Gets the numbers out of what you were sent: text and table extraction from statements, invoices, and filled forms, with bundled scripts for the deterministic parts rather than improvised parsing.
Best when: The inputs arrived as PDFs and retyping them is both slow and where errors enter.
- 4pptx
Turns the finished numbers into the review deck, and — more useful monthly — reads last month’s deck so it can be updated rather than rebuilt.
Best when: You present the report to a board, an investor, or the team.
No terminal
Installing these on Claude.ai
Four steps in the browser. You are not writing code — the whole install is a file upload in your account settings.
- 1
Turn on code execution
On claude.ai, open Settings → Capabilities and enable "Code execution and file creation". Skills that produce files need it, and it is off for some accounts by default.
- 2
Download the skill folder
Follow the source link on the skill page to its repository and download the skill’s folder. Read the SKILL.md before you install it — it is plain text, and it is the instructions the agent will follow.
- 3
Zip it and upload
Compress the folder into a .zip, then on claude.ai go to Customize → Skills and upload it. Skills you upload are private to your account.
- 4
Ask for the work
Start a normal conversation and describe the job in your own words. The skill loads itself when your request matches what its description covers — you never invoke it by name.
Anthropic documents this flow in Use skills in Claude. Plans and menu labels change — if a label has moved, the support article is the source of truth, not this page.
Limits
What these will not do
- This is reporting, not bookkeeping. Nothing here connects to your bank, your accounting system, or your payment processor. No Skill in the catalog currently clears our bar as a dedicated bookkeeping tool, which is why there is no guide for that.
- Numbers in, numbers out. A spreadsheet skill will happily build a beautiful model on a figure you got wrong — the arithmetic is checked, the inputs are not.
- pdf extracts text and tables; it is not an OCR miracle. Scanned or photographed statements extract far less reliably than digital ones.
- performance-report structures a marketing summary from data you give it. It has no access to your ad accounts or analytics.
- Claude.ai Skills run in a server-side sandbox: upload the inputs, download the outputs, no access to files on your computer.
FAQ
Common questions
What is the best AI for building business spreadsheets?
xlsx, Anthropic’s Excel skill. It creates and analyses spreadsheets with real formulas, formatting, and charts, so what you get is a working model you can hand to an accountant or an investor — not a table of static numbers. It is verified on Claude.ai and installs in the browser.
Can it do my bookkeeping?
No, and we would rather say so than sell you a workaround. These Skills report on data you provide; none of them connects to a bank feed, a ledger, or an invoicing system. The catalog has no dedicated bookkeeping Skill that clears our verification bar yet, so there is no guide for it — when one exists, it will be listed.
I get supplier invoices as PDFs. Can it pull the totals out?
Yes, that is the pdf skill: text and table extraction, including form fields, with bundled scripts for the deterministic parts. Digital PDFs extract well; scans and phone photos are much less reliable, so check the numbers it returns before they enter a model.
How do I turn the report into something I can present?
pptx. It creates and edits real .pptx files, and it can read an existing deck — so the practical monthly workflow is to keep one review deck and have it updated with this month’s figures rather than rebuilt. The pitch-deck guide covers that skill in more depth.
Is any of this safe with financial data?
Decide that against your own policy, not our reassurance. Skills you upload are private to your account, and they run in Anthropic’s server-side sandbox — but you are still sending business figures to a third-party service. Read the SKILL.md before installing, and check your plan’s data-retention terms in Anthropic’s documentation.
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