Financial Model Review Skill

Help startup founders understand how investors will evaluate their financial model — validating structure, unit economics, runway, and metrics against stage-appropriate standards. Produce a thorough review with actionable improvements. The tone is founder-first: a rigorous but supportive coaching session.

Skill Metadata

• Author: lool-ventures
• Version: managed in founder-skills/.claude-plugin/plugin.json
• Compatibility: Python 3.10+ and uv for script execution. openpyxl required for Excel parsing.
• Imports (optional):
  • market-sizing:sizing.json — validate revenue-to-SOM consistency
  • deck-review:checklist.json — cross-check model-to-deck number alignment
• Exports:
  • report.json → ic-sim, fundraise-readiness, dd-readiness
  • unit_economics.json → metrics-benchmarker, ic-sim
  • runway.json → fundraise-readiness

Skill Execution Model (READ FIRST)

This skill runs inline in the main thread (not as a sub-agent). The main thread has full tool access including Bash, and is responsible for orchestrating the full pipeline: running producer scripts, persisting artifacts, and dispatching the financial-model-review sub-agent at specific moments.

Two dispatch contexts for the sub-agent:

• Context A — Per-step analytical dispatch (Mitigation 1): Steps for INPUTS_REVIEW, UNIT_ECONOMICS, RUNWAY_SCENARIOS, and CHECKLIST dispatch the financial-model-review agent via the Task tool. The agent does deep analysis and returns structured JSON. The main thread captures the JSON and pipes it through the producer script. The sub-agent does NOT write artifacts directly.
• Context B — Post-compose coaching dispatch: The final step dispatches the sub-agent after compose_report.py writes report.md. The sub-agent reads report.md, appends ## Coaching Commentary, verifies all canonical artifacts on disk, and returns a structured success payload.

Why this model: In Cowork, sub-agents have a restricted tool allowlist (no Bash). By keeping orchestration in the main thread and dispatching sub-agents only for analytical or post-compose tasks that use only Read/Edit/Glob/Grep, the pipeline works correctly in both Claude Code (CLI) and Cowork.

Tolerant JSON extraction protocol (Context A): After dispatching the sub-agent, capture its final assistant message. The sub-agent should return raw JSON, but may wrap it in ```json ... ``` fences or add a prose preamble. Extract JSON tolerantly:

1. If the message is wrapped in a ```json ... ``` (or plain ``` ... ```) fence, strip the fence first.
2. Try to parse the stripped text directly as JSON.
3. If that fails, walk through the text looking for the first { character and try json.JSONDecoder().raw_decode(text[i:]) — this is brace-aware and handles nested objects correctly (unlike regex, which truncates on the first }).
4. If extraction fails entirely, re-prompt the sub-agent with: "Your previous reply could not be parsed as JSON. Return ONLY the JSON object — no markdown fences, no prose preamble."

Context-pressure note: This skill has the highest context budget of the 5 skills. The win from Mitigation 1 is excluding sub-agent reasoning and the 40-60 KB raw extract_model.py output — which flows through the INPUTS_REVIEW dispatch: the sub-agent reads it in its own context window, returns only the corrected inputs.json. The artifacts themselves still accumulate in the main thread (~80-130K total), but that is manageable.

See founder-skills/references/skill-execution-model.md for the full inline-skill execution model (3 dispatch contexts, Mitigation 1+2, producer contract, Cowork quirks, per-symptom triage).

Input Formats

Accept any format: Excel (.xlsx), CSV, Google Sheets exports, financial documents, or conversational input. For Excel files, use extract_model.py to parse. For other formats, extract data manually into the inputs.json schema. If multiple copies of the same file exist (e.g., Financials.xlsx and Financials (1).xlsx), use the most recently modified version and note the duplication to the founder. If timestamps are identical, ask the founder which file to use. If the founder cannot be queried, prefer the file without parenthetical suffixes (e.g., (1), (2)) — these typically indicate browser re-download duplicates.

Available Scripts

All scripts are at ${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT}/skills/financial-model-review/scripts/:

• extract_model.py — Extracts structured data from Excel (.xlsx) and CSV files
• validate_extraction.py — Anti-hallucination gate: cross-references model_data.json against inputs.json to catch mismatches (company name, salary, revenue, cash traceability); run after extraction, before review
• validate_inputs.py — Four-layer validation of inputs.json (structural, consistency, sanity, completeness); supports --fix to auto-correct sign errors
• checklist.py — Scores 46 criteria across 7 categories with profile-based auto-gating
• unit_economics.py — Computes and benchmarks 11 unit economics metrics
• runway.py — Multi-scenario runway stress-test with decision points
• compose_report.py — Assembles report with cross-artifact validation; --strict exits 1 on high-severity warnings (corrupt/missing artifacts)
• apply_corrections.py — Processes founder's downloaded corrections file: coerces types, normalizes ILS→USD, merges overrides, writes corrected_inputs.json and extraction_corrections.json
• verify_review.py — Review completeness gate: checks artifact existence, content quality, and cross-artifact consistency; --gate 1 for after-compose, --gate 2 (default) for final; exit 0 = publishable, exit 1 = gaps remain
• visualize.py — Generates self-contained HTML with SVG charts (not JSON)
• explore.py — Generates self-contained interactive HTML explorer from review artifacts; outputs HTML (not JSON)
• review_inputs.py — Dual-mode review viewer: HTTP server with live validation (Claude Code) or self-contained static HTML with JS sanity metrics (Cowork); outputs HTML

Also available from ${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT}/scripts/ (shared):

• find_artifact.py — Resolves artifact paths by skill name and filename (used for cross-skill lookups)

Run with: python3 ${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT}/skills/financial-model-review/scripts/<script>.py --pretty [args]

Available References

Read as needed from ${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT}/skills/financial-model-review/references/:

• checklist-criteria.md — All 46 checklist criteria with gate definitions
• schema-inputs.md — JSON schema for inputs.json (the artifact the agent writes)
• artifact-schemas.md — JSON schemas for script-produced output artifacts
• data-sufficiency.md — Data sufficiency gate and qualitative path
• extraction-pitfalls.md — 8 common extraction errors (scale denomination, payroll aggregation, collections vs revenue, etc.)

From ${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT}/references/ (shared): stage-expectations.md, benchmarks.md, israel-guidance.md, revenue-model-types.md, common-mistakes.md

Artifact Pipeline

Every review deposits structured JSON artifacts into a working directory. The final step assembles all artifacts into a report and validates consistency. This is not optional.