A 5-step guide for everyone who’s ever stitched exports and vibes together the night before a board meeting.

You know the one: 14 columns, three date formats, duplicate rows, a “revenue” field that’s secretly a string. And leadership wants a story by 9am.

Here’s the workflow I actually use:

  1. Dump it in raw. Don’t pre-clean. Upload the ugly CSV as-is and let Claude do the dirty work.
    Prompt: “Here’s a raw export. Profile it: columns, data types, nulls, duplicates, anything that looks off.”
  2. Now clean it, but make it show its work. This is the step everyone skips and later regrets.
    Prompt: “Standardize the dates, dedupe rows, fix the numeric fields. Then list every assumption you made.” If you don’t see the assumptions, you don’t trust the output.
  3. Ask the business question, not the data question. Nobody upstairs wants rows.
    Prompt: “Don’t give me a table. Tell me where we’re losing revenue, what changed vs last month, and your best guess at why.”
  4. Make it check its own numbers. AI rarely says “I don’t know”. It guesses, confidently. So force a second pass.
    Prompt: “Recalculate the 3 headline numbers a different way and flag anything that doesn’t reconcile.”
  5. Turn it into one slide a CFO can read in 60 seconds.
    Prompt: “Summarize as 3 takeaways, 1 risk, 1 recommendation. Plain English, no jargon.”

That’s it. Three hours of spreadsheet wrestling → a tight, defensible report.

One caveat: Claude does the cleaning and the math. You still own the judgment. The “so what” is your job, not the model’s.

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