Financial Domain Guardrails

The financial domain has a specific failure mode that the legal domain does not: false precision. Claude will report "$2,347,891.23" when the underlying data only supports "$2.3M plus or minus 5%." The extra decimal places create an illusion of accuracy that misleads the reader. Every financial skill should include a precision rule: "Report to the same precision as the source data. If the source is in thousands, report in thousands. Never add decimal places that the source data does not support."

The second guardrail is source attribution. Every number in a Claude-generated financial report should trace back to a specific cell, row, or calculation in the source data. When Claude says "gross margin declined 340 basis points," the report should specify: "Q1 gross margin: 62.1% (source: P&L row 8, column D). Q4 gross margin: 58.7% (source: P&L row 8, column H). Decline: 340 bps." This traceability lets the reader verify any number without re-running the analysis.

The third guardrail applies specifically to reporting. Every financial deliverable Claude produces must include a methodology section and a limitations section. The methodology explains what Claude calculated and how. The limitations explain what Claude did not calculate, what assumptions it made, and what additional analysis would be needed for a complete picture.

This is not busywork. It is the difference between a financial analysis that a CFO can act on and one that a CFO throws away because they cannot trust the numbers. Financial professionals are trained to question methodology. If your Claude-generated report does not explain its methodology, the first question from any financial professional will be "how did you calculate this?" and if the answer is "an AI did it," the report goes in the trash.