Cash flow forecasting in minutes, not days — with Claude, even when the JMD/USD rate won’t sit still

Ask any Jamaican importer what keeps them up at night and the answer is rarely sales. It is the gap between the day they pay their supplier in US dollars and the day their customers pay them in Jamaican dollars. A distributor in Kingston orders stock in March, settles the invoice in USD, and waits sixty days for local retailers to pay in JMD. If the rate moves against her in those sixty days, a deal that looked profitable on paper quietly is not.This is the hardest part of running a business in a small, open economy. Your costs are often in one currency and your revenue in another, and the exchange rate between them does not ask your permission before it moves. A cash flow forecast built on last month’s rate is out of date the moment you save the file.Artificial intelligence does not fix the exchange rate. Nothing does. But it changes how quickly a small team can see what the rate is doing to them — and how many “what if” versions of the future they can prepare for before one of them arrives.Meet Claude — and why it lives in ExcelThe first column in this series showed ChatGPT working inside Google Sheets. This one introduces a different assistant, suited to heavier financial work: Claude, made by a company called Anthropic. Claude now runs directly inside Microsoft Excel as an add-in, which matters because Excel is where most serious Jamaican finance work still happens — the budgets, the models, the files the bank asks for.Claude is not a chatbot bolted onto the side of your spreadsheet. It can read an entire workbook, understand how your tabs link together, build new models, audit the formulas you already have, and — the part that matters most for currency risk — run sensitivity analyses, where it recalculates your numbers across a whole range of assumptions at once. You ask in plain English; it does the spreadsheet work.One practical point before you start: Claude in Excel runs on Anthropic’s paid plans, so you will need a paid Claude subscription to add it. There is no free tier for the Excel add-in. You install it once from the Excel add-ins store — open Excel, go to the Add-ins menu, search for Claude, and click Add — then sign in with the account that holds your plan.From one forecast to a hundredThe old way of forecasting cash flow was to build a single spreadsheet, plug in one assumption about the rate, and hope. Rebuilding it for a different rate meant an afternoon of editing formulas — so most teams only ever modelled one future, the one they expected.Claude collapses that afternoon into minutes. Open your workbook and ask: “build a 13-week cash flow forecast with columns for USD payables and JMD receivables, and convert each week at an exchange rate I can change in one cell.” Then ask it to run a sensitivity analysis — “show me the lowest cash balance in each week if the rate moves anywhere from two per cent stronger to five per cent weaker.” Instead of one forecast, you are looking at the full range of outcomes, laid out in seconds rather than days.Purpose-built tools can sit alongside this. Forecasting platforms such as Float connect directly to accounting software like QuickBooks and Xero, pull your live transactions, and generate a rolling forecast that updates itself as invoices are paid. Claude handles the modelling and the “what ifs”; a tool like Float keeps the underlying numbers current. For a business with steady volume, the forecast is never more than a day old.What this looks like on a TuesdayImagine a treasury officer at a mid-sized manufacturer. On Monday the firm has a large USD payment due in three weeks. The old question — “will we have the cash?” — used to take two days to answer properly. Now she opens the model in Excel, asks Claude “what is our lowest cash balance over the next 21 days if the rate weakens by three per cent,” and has an answer before her coffee is cold. If the answer is uncomfortable, she has three weeks to act: draw on a facility, bring forward a collection, or delay a discretionary payment.That is the real shift. Claude does not remove the risk. It buys you time to respond to it, and it lets one person do work that used to need a small team.A note on securityBefore putting real numbers into any AI tool, the first question to ask is simple: is this safe? With Claude the answer is refreshingly specific — but you have to know which version you are using.Anthropic’s business plans — Claude for Work, Team, and Enterprise — do not use your data to train their models. That protection is built into the commercial terms; there is no setting to get wrong, and your content is encrypted in storage and in transit. The personal paid plans (Pro and Max) are different: since late 2025, those conversations can be used to train Claude’s models unless you actively switch training off in your privacy settings. So the rule for a finance team handling real numbers is simple. Use a Team or Enterprise plan, where your data is private by default — or, if you are on a personal plan, open the settings and turn training off before you upload anything sensitive. And as always, if a file contains client names, salaries, or bank details you would not email to a stranger, mask them first. Treat any AI tool as a colleague you have just met: helpful, but not yet cleared to see everything.What it will not do for youClaude cannot tell you where the JMD/USD rate is going. Anyone, or any tool, that claims to predict it with confidence is selling something. What Claude does is arithmetic and modelling at speed: it takes your assumptions and shows you the consequences. The assumptions are still yours, and so is the judgement about which scenario to plan for. Review the logic, sanity-check the totals against your bank balance, and never let a forecast you have not read drive a real decision about real money.What to try this week1. In Excel, ask Claude to build a 13-week cash flow forecast with one editable cell for the exchange rate, so the whole model updates when you change it.2. Ask Claude to run a sensitivity analysis across a range of rates — base, stronger dollar, weaker dollar — and compare the lowest cash balance in each.3. Ask it to flag any week where your closing cash balance falls below a number you set.4. If you use QuickBooks or Xero, trial a forecasting tool that pulls your live transactions automatically and feed its output into your Claude model.Always review the assumptions and the totals before acting on any forecast.Next week’s column looks at how Jamaican businesses can build an interactive dashboard from a single prompt — turning a static spreadsheet into something a manager can actually click through and explore.Peta-Gaye Hardy is the founder of PGH Consulting, LLC, where she helps finance and operations teams adopt AI in practical, low-risk ways. She writes the weekly AI in Finance Business column and is based between Jamaica and the United States. Learn more at www.pghconsultinggroup.com. Follow on Instagram @pghconsultinggroup.Disclosures: This article is informational and does not constitute investment, tax, legal, accounting, or foreign-exchange advice. Exchange-rate movements are uncertain and cannot be reliably predicted. Claude in Excel requires a paid Claude subscription. The author has no commercial relationship with Anthropic, Microsoft, Float, or any product mentioned and was not compensated by them. Readers should consult a qualified professional before acting.