A complete setup guide for financial research workflows

Overview

Custom Skills in Claude let you create tailored workflows for specialized research tasks.

For example, you can build Skills that:

• Standardize how Claude extracts data from financial reports
• Apply your organization’s equity research framework
• Format tables and summaries in your preferred style
• Parse and summarize long earnings call transcripts
• Run light data transformations using Python

Each Skill acts like a self-contained playbook that Claude can invoke automatically when relevant.

1. Understanding What a Skill Is

A Skill is a small, modular instruction set, stored in a folder, that tells Claude how to perform a specific task.

A Skill can be:

• A simple Markdown file with clear instructions
• Or a complex package containing scripts, references, and structured data

Good Skills are narrow and repeatable. Think of one task at a time:

Extract quarterly revenue and PAT from company filings, not “analyze all financials.”