Back office: Fund finance and treasury
3 min readIn fund finance, good places to start are the month-end close and a shadow net asset value (NAV) calculation checked against the administrator’s. Because the work follows set rules in Excel and gets audited, it suits Claude for Excel (alongside the rest of the Claude for M365 suite) with fund-administration skills.
Main use cases
Preparing the month-end close for review
The finance team saves its month-end checklist as a skill. Claude works through it using the firm’s books or shadow books and the administrator’s extracts, and prepares the accruals, roll-forwards, allocations, draft journal entries, variance commentary, and close report for the team to review. Anthropic’s finance plugin is a starting point for journal entries, reconciliations, and variance analysis.
Checking the administrator’s NAV
Code reconciles positions, prices, accruals, and fees against the administrator’s NAV, and agents propose a root cause for each break. For private holdings, agents assemble the valuation support pack, with comparables and a memo, for the valuation committee. Before distribution, Claude ties every capital-account statement to the NAV pack and flags mismatches.
Recalculating fees, carry, and waterfalls
With side-letter and LPA terms in a structured table, code recomputes management and incentive fees and carry from the fund documents, investor by investor, and Claude explains any differences from the administrator’s figures.
Tracking margin and cash, and supporting regulatory filings
In treasury, Claude explains day-over-day margin moves, compares financing terms across brokers, tracks balances across banks, brokers, and wallets, and drafts the daily cash note. For regulatory filings such as Form PF and Form ADV in the US, or Annex IV reports under the AIFMD in the UK and EU, agents assemble the data and draft a comparison with the prior filing for the preparer.