I Built a Balance Sheet Analyst with Claude
A faster way to understand any business’s financial structure.
How much a company earns is only half the story..
The other half is what it takes to earn it.
Imagine 2 businesses:
both grow sales by 20%.
both added $3 of revenue last year.
one spent $1 of capital to get there.
the other needed to spend $3 for the same growth.
These are completely different businesses.
The difference only shows up in the balance sheet.
You may think:
Okay Mostapha, I know that I need to read the balance sheet carefully...
But there is a trap.
Reading latest balance sheet does not give you the full picture.
You need the last 5–7 years to understand how the business is evolving.
7 years ago , a company needed $1 of capital to grow 20% .
Today, it needs $3 to have the same growth.
Should investors still pay the same multiple for that business?
Probably not.
But we all know that reading 7 years of balance sheets takes hours and hours of work.
This is where AI can save you real time.
I built a Claude Skill that answers the main balance sheet questions in 30 minutes instead of 5 hours :
Where could the balance sheet break?
How much capital does growth require?
Is the business becoming more or less capital intensive?
Who is funding the assets: shareholders, lenders, customers, or suppliers?
Here is what the Skill found when I ran it on Microsoft:
Claude shows how Microsoft used to run on other people’s money:
Customers paid for Office up front.
Supplier bills had not yet been paid.
Salaries had not yet reached employees’ bank accounts.
In 2019, this pile of free funding covered 97% of the assets Microsoft needed to operate.
Then Microsoft started building data centres..
And data centres require a lot more capital.
Claude shows how every $100 of Microsoft’s assets was financed in 2019 compared with 2025:
By the end of this article, you download a Claude Skill and use it to analyze years of balance sheets for any stock.
Want the ready to use Skill?
Paid members can download this Balance Sheet Skill and run it on any stock immediately.
You also get full access to the Investing AI Library, including every prompt and Skill I build for research, earnings analysis, thesis testing, and more.
