Description

This session guides finance and accounting professionals through a five-part approach to using Claude across a complete budgeting and planning cycle — the T.R.A.C.E. framework. Attendees move through the cycle in sequence: setting up assumptions and planning logic, coordinating with departments, consolidating scattered inputs, explaining variances, and packaging results for leadership.

Topics addressed include:

• Setting up budget templates with categories and logic suited to the organization
• Turning business context and historical figures into readable assumption write-ups
• Pulling together numbers from multiple departments and catching what's missing or mismatched
• Converting raw variance figures into narratives that explain the underlying story
• Building summary materials for executives and boards in accessible, non-technical language

Each part of the session includes prompt examples and shows how the way a request is framed changes the quality of what comes back. Because budget outputs are read and judged by people outside finance, unclear or inconsistent write-ups can undercut an otherwise solid plan. The session positions Claude as a way to speed up and standardize this writing and organizing work, while leaving all analysis and sign-off with the finance professional.

Areas Covered

• Where Claude fits naturally into the budgeting cycle, and where finance judgment has to lead
• Setting up and refining budget templates — categories, layout, and underlying logic
• Turning historical data and business context into documented budget assumptions
• Preparing departmental request templates and communication materials for business unit leaders
• Pulling together budget inputs across departments and surfacing gaps or mismatches
• Writing variance narratives that explain outcomes clearly, not just the numbers behind them
• Preparing rolling forecasts, reforecast write-ups, and mid-year revision packages
• Building executive-facing budget materials — summary slides, key messages, and visual structure
• Writing budget narratives aimed at boards and leadership audiences outside finance
• Documenting scenario planning — upside, downside, and base-case write-ups
• Assembling a reusable set of prompts for recurring cycle tasks
• Strengthening how department heads stay informed and aligned across the planning cycle

Background

The annual budgeting cycle asks finance teams to move fast across many moving parts at once — building templates, gathering departmental numbers, writing narrative explanations, and pulling everything into a presentation leadership can follow. Much of this effort is repetitive and document-heavy rather than analytically difficult, which makes it a strong fit for AI support. This session lays out a structured way to bring Claude into the budgeting cycle stage by stage, so teams can cut down on manual drafting time while keeping ownership of every judgment call.

Why Should You Attend

Every budget cycle brings a familiar crunch — juggling templates, chasing department numbers, and writing commentary against the clock. Teams that bring AI into this workflow tend to spend less time on repetitive drafting and more time reviewing and refining, which shows up in cleaner documentation and stronger final presentations. If your budgeting process today is still built entirely on manual drafting at every step, this session lays out where and how to change that.
You will learn how to:

• Set up templates and category structures that fit your organization's reporting needs
• Write assumption narratives that read clearly and hold up under review
• Bring multi-department figures together and flag gaps early
• Turn variance numbers into explanations that make sense to a non-finance reader
• Put together executive and board materials that land with the right audience
• eat AI output as a starting draft that still needs your review, not a finished product

The session also flags common missteps — publishing AI-drafted commentary without checking it against source figures, and leaning on generic templates that don't reflect how your organization actually reports.

Who Should Attend

• FP&A Managers and Analysts
• Budget Managers and Budget Directors
• Finance Directors and CFOs
• Controllers and Assistant Controllers
• Corporate Finance Professionals
• Accounting Managers with budgeting responsibilities
• Operations Managers responsible for departmental budgets
• Business Unit Leaders who own budget processes
• Treasury and Cash Flow Planning Professionals.