🚀 My Unofficial ‘Claude for Startup Finance’ Plugin | The AI CFO

Hi everyone - happy World Cup season! I am an 'every four years' football fan, but I've been loving the matches so far. The beautiful game is a welcome respite from the craziness of the outside world - and this past week, the Anthropic/Fable drama felt like a major shift in AI's geopolitical significance.

It might sound crazy to say, but I believe we've only just scratched the surface of the role that AI will play in the national media narrative. All this hand-wringing and we still don't see AI causing any measurable impact in productivity or employment figures 🤷 Alas, I (and many of you) am betting that this is the technological wave to catch.

After writing my last essay on the shortcomings of 'Claude for Small Businesses', I started thinking about what a truly useful Claude plugin might look like. I decided to be the change I want to see in the world and built a plugin designed specifically for early-stage startup finance.

 I built the Unofficial 'Claude for Startup Finance' Plugin 

ICYMI: In my last essay, I wrote about how Anthropic's Claude for Small Business missed the mark because "small business" isn't actually a real category. A dental office and a Series A SaaS company share nothing operationally. So a plugin that tries to serve both ends up helping neither.

I've experienced firsthand how powerful Claude can be when configured & run thoughtfully. And I strongly believe in the power of AI to transform finance functions, today. But the out-of-the-box tools currently available don't work for startups, so I built my own plugin that does.

My unofficial 'Claude for Startup Finance' plugin is narrow on purpose. It's designed for early-stage startups with their specific CFO stack and pain points in mind.

 How it works 

This plugin connects four tools that most operators in startup finance are already running - QuickBooks, Mercury, Ramp & Stripe - to give Claude an interconnected view of your back-office operations.

Financials, cash, spend, and revenue all in one place, ready for a finance-savvy founder or operator to build their own custom Claude workflows.

So, instead of logging into each of these tools individually and stitching the picture together manually, you can collaborate with Claude to supercharge your capabilities.

 Anatomy of a plugin 

The plugin consists of two basic building blocks: Claude Connectors (MCP servers) that enable Claude to query (or even write to) your systems, and Skills built to run workflows that we commonly see early-stage startups struggle with.

Built-in Claude Connectors

The Ramp, Mercury and Stripe connectors were easy wins. These are quick one-click connections with no engineering required. You can log in directly through Claude Desktop and start chatting with Claude about your data immediately. Here's what they can do:

• Mercury: view your runway forecast in seconds, pulled from every account balance. Claude can read everything and move nothing.
• Ramp: a ranked list of every vendor by spend, with redundant SaaS tools flagged. Found money, no manual transaction auditing needed.
• Stripe: MRR on demand, no BI tool required. Claude constructs it from your raw revenue data (based on guidance you give it about your revenue model).

One thing worth noting: these connectors read and reason, but they don't give Claude write capabilities. If you want to go full YOLO mode, you'll need to build your own connector, like I did for QBO.

Building an actually useful QBO MCP

As I covered last week, QuickBooks Online's Claude Connector is lacking the ability to do real finance work. It can pull a few canned reports, but it doesn't give you access to the raw data you need to build bespoke, useful workflows. I was so annoyed by this that I built my own fully-hosted MCP.

It wasn't as hard as it sounds! I pulled QBO's GitHub MCP documentation and built a startup-centric version that can pull full statements and general ledger drill downs from your accounting source of truth. It took me ~5 hours, and most of that time went into setting up an application on the Intuit Developer platform. I can share a follow-up post on this process if there's interest, but anyone can access the MCP I built through the airCFO plugin.

Skills

Once you've set up the infrastructure, you can tackle problems in collaboration with Claude. But in order to unlock the full power of an AI coworker, you need to build a Skills library.

This is very difficult to shortcut, because a Skill encodes your company's specific processes, so a generic template will only take you so far. You can't download someone else's Skill and expect it to work perfectly in your workflows.

Here's what I built for airCFO (and what you can build too):

• Vendor spend analysis & rationalization: pulls your entire vendor spend profile & identifies potential opportunities for cost savings.
• Month-end flux analysis: pulls the P&L from QBO by month, finds material variances, drills into the general ledger to explain what drove each one, and writes it up for review.
• Live runway forecasting: chains the whole stack into one comprehensive picture. Cash from Mercury, burn from Ramp and QuickBooks. One Skill becomes a complete breakdown, run consistently every month.

 Pulling it all together 

Here's what this looks like in practice:

1. I kick off Claude with a skill trigger: Use the /runway-forecast skill to give a breakdown of our current financial position.
2. Claude goes right to work & pulls cash balances from Mercury, vendor spend from Ramp, and people costs by department from QBO. No manual stitching involved.
3. After a few minutes, Claude presents an interactive artifact with a months-of-runway figure & a short narrative I can drop straight into an executive update.

 Learn to install this plugin for yourself 

If you want to unlock the power of Claude for your back-office, I'm hosting a webinar on June 23rd where I'm running through these capabilities live. You can watch me run the live build step-by-step and ask questions in real time.

To fast track the process, every attendee will receive airCFO's unofficial Claude for Early Stage Finance plugin. It includes the connectors, the custom QuickBooks MCP, and the Skills we cover on the call.

Register here.

📡 On My Radar

• On accounting automation: OpenAI and Thrive built a tax agent that gets sharper the more accountants correct it, turning every practitioner fix into a training signal instead of a one-off edit. Human expertise sitting on top of the model is the thing that compounds.
• On org structures: Speaking of human x machine collaboration, Satya Nadella wrote on X that companies will build both human capital AND token capital through self-reinforcing cognitive loops. The value of the model is fleeting; the orgs that will win long-term are the ones where humans and machines keep teaching each other.
• On fundraising: Ben Freeberg built a seed fund laser-focused on fixing cancer care. His framework for working investor networks is definitely worth a listen. Check out the latest Funded episode.

That's all for this edition of The AI CFO. We'll be back soon with more musings on the future of AI-powered finance & operations.

Cheers,

👋 Alex Wittenberg, CEO @ airCFO