Deal sourcing, screening, CIM production, IC memos, returns analysis, and portfolio monitoring. Built for practitioners who are tired of document production eating their analyst hours.
The private equity and investment banking workflows that eat the most analyst time are almost always document production and data synthesis, not judgment. Screening a deal against fund criteria, drafting a CIM from a data room, building an IC memo structure from diligence notes, monitoring a portfolio across twelve companies. The judgment calls require senior expertise. The production work mostly requires endurance.
AI skills flip that ratio. Because a skill holds your firm's criteria, templates, and context permanently, every document starts from your framework rather than a blank page. The analyst writes the sections that require genuine synthesis. The skill handles the structure, the formatting, and the initial pass that used to take half a day.
This guide covers the full toolkit, organized by deal phase, with separate tracks for IB and PE workflows.
Why AI Skills Beat Financial Templates
Most finance teams have templates: pitch deck shells, CIM structures, IC memo formats inherited from whoever set them up years ago. Templates solve the blank-page problem but create a different one. They produce outputs that are structurally correct but substantively thin. Analysts fill in the boxes without necessarily building the analysis the boxes are supposed to represent.
An AI skill is different from a template in three ways that matter for deal work:
It knows your criteria. A PE deal screening skill that holds your fund's actual investment criteria (sector focus, revenue thresholds, EBITDA minimums, geographic restrictions, deal size range) flags mismatches immediately rather than after an analyst spends four hours building a model on an ineligible target.
It synthesizes, not just formats. Given a company's data room documents, a CIM-building skill doesn't just populate a structure. It extracts and synthesizes the relevant information, flags gaps that need clarification, and surfaces inconsistencies between the management presentation and the financial statements.
It improves with your feedback. A template is static. A CLAUDE.md skill evolves. When a senior banker or partner says "we always lead with market size before business model," you add that instruction once and it applies to every subsequent output. Institutional knowledge becomes executable, not just tribal.
Investment Banking Track
Pitch Deck: Win the Mandate Before the Process Starts
A pitch deck for a sell-side mandate needs to accomplish three things quickly: demonstrate you understand the business better than the company thinks you do, establish a credible valuation range that passes the smell test, and show a process architecture that gives sellers confidence they'll get the best outcome. Most pitches fail on the first point. The analysis is generic enough that it could apply to any company in the sector.
An IB pitch deck skill builds the analytical backbone of a sell-side pitch: market positioning analysis, comparable transaction set with relevant multiples, preliminary valuation range (EV/EBITDA, EV/Revenue, precedent transactions), buyer universe thesis, and process timeline.
"Build a sell-side pitch for [Company], a $45M revenue B2B SaaS business in facilities management software. LTM EBITDA: $8.2M, growing 22% YoY. Comparable transactions: [list]. Produce: market positioning, valuation range with comp set, strategic buyer universe rationale, and a 12-week process timeline."
The skill is most effective when your CLAUDE.md holds your bank's pitch format preferences, sector coverage focus, and any house views on valuation methodology for specific verticals.
CIM Builder: First-Draft the Book in Hours, Not Days
The Confidential Information Memorandum is the single most labor-intensive document in a sell-side process. A thorough CIM requires synthesizing management presentations, audited financials, market research, competitive positioning, customer concentration analysis, and growth initiatives into a coherent 40 to 80 page narrative. Analysts historically spend two to three weeks on a first draft. Partners spend another week rewriting it.
A CIM builder skill compresses the first-draft timeline by doing the synthesis layer: extracting key facts from data room documents, building the financial summary tables in the right format, drafting the business description and market overview sections, and flagging information gaps that need management follow-up.
"Build the business overview section of the CIM using this management presentation: [paste or attach]. Flag any claims that need verification against the financials, and note anywhere the narrative contradicts the historical growth rate."
"Here are three years of audited financials. Build the financial summary section: income statement bridge, EBITDA reconciliation, revenue breakdown by segment, and a normalized EBITDA calculation with addback justifications."
Private Equity Track
Deal Sourcing: Build Proprietary Pipeline Before the Bankers Call
The best PE deals are the ones where you find the company before it runs a process. Where the relationship is established, the founder trusts you, and you're not competing with seventeen other funds in a banker-run auction.
A deal sourcing skill systematizes this work. Feed it your fund's investment criteria and sector thesis, and it generates a structured target identification framework: the specific company characteristics that signal fit, the data sources for finding them (industry databases, conference attendee lists, trade publication coverage), and outreach sequencing that doesn't feel like cold selling to founder-operators who didn't ask to be acquired.
"Build a deal sourcing system for our thesis: lower-middle-market B2B software businesses, $5 to $25M revenue, founder-owned, serving regulated industries. What are the best identification sources, what signals should we screen for, and what does a 6-month outreach sequence look like that doesn't feel transactional?"
Deal Screening: Kill Bad Deals Before You Build a Model
The purpose of deal screening is to fail fast. Most deals that cross a PE firm's desk don't fit the fund's criteria. Wrong sector, wrong size, wrong business quality, wrong management team, wrong competitive dynamics. The screening phase should surface these mismatches in hours, not after a week of analyst time building a model on a company that never had a chance.
A deal screening skill runs a structured first-pass evaluation against your fund's criteria. Feed it a CIM, teaser, or basic company information, and it produces: a criteria match/mismatch table, preliminary business quality assessment across the key dimensions (recurring revenue, customer concentration, competitive moat, management depth), initial red flags with specific evidence, and a recommendation on whether to advance to a full diligence process.
"Screen this CIM against our fund criteria: [paste CIM summary]. Our parameters: $10 to $50M EBITDA, less than 30% customer concentration in top 5, recurring revenue above 60%, defensible niche, no turnarounds. Score each criterion, flag red flags with citations from the document, and give me a pass/advance/conditional-advance recommendation with reasoning."
What goes in your screening CLAUDE.md:
# Fund Investment Criteria
## Hard Criteria (automatic pass if failed)
- Target EBITDA range: $[X]M to $[Y]M
- Revenue model: [recurring % minimum]
- Geography: [restrictions]
- Sector: [focus / exclusions]
- Deal type: [control buyout / growth equity / etc.]
## Soft Criteria (scored, not automatic)
- Customer concentration
- Management quality signals
- Competitive moat assessment
- Growth quality (organic vs. acquired)
## Automatic Red Flags
- [List specific patterns that are instant disqualifiers]
IC Memo: Build the Investment Case That Survives Partner Scrutiny
The Investment Committee memo is where deals are made or broken internally. An IC memo that presents the thesis clearly, anticipates the objections, and addresses the key risks head-on moves efficiently through approval. One that buries the downside, overweights management optimism, or fails to present the bear case gives the IC committee no choice but to slow the process down with questions that should have been answered in the document.
An IC memo skill builds the full structure from your diligence notes and financial model: investment thesis (3 to 4 sentences, not a paragraph), business overview calibrated to what the IC needs to know rather than everything you learned, market and competitive analysis, financial summary with entry assumptions, returns analysis across scenarios, key risks with explicit mitigants, and the monitoring framework for post-close.
"Draft the IC memo thesis section for [Company]. The investment case in one sentence: [describe]. Key support points from diligence: [list]. Lead with the strongest evidence for the thesis, then address the bear case proactively."
"Write the risk section of the IC memo. Identified risks from DD: [list]. For each risk: quantify the potential impact on EBITDA or exit multiple, identify the specific mitigant, and note how we'll monitor post-close."
The risk section prompt is worth running separately. It's often the weakest part of analyst-drafted memos because analysts are (understandably) invested in the deal advancing. A skill with explicit instructions to "quantify the downside and be specific about mitigants" produces more rigorous risk analysis than most first drafts.
Returns Analysis: Model the Full Exit Spectrum Before You Commit
Returns analysis in PE is about more than the base case. The base case always looks fine. That's why you're bringing the deal to IC. What matters is the distribution of outcomes: how does the return profile hold up under a revenue miss, a multiple compression, a slower-than-expected exit timeline, or a combination?
A returns analysis skill builds the full scenario matrix (base, bull, and bear cases) across the relevant return dimensions: MOIC, IRR, and equity value at exit under each scenario. It flags the specific assumptions the returns are most sensitive to, which tells you where to focus diligence effort and which deal terms matter most in negotiation.
"Build a returns analysis for this deal. Entry: $85M EV, 7.5x EBITDA. LTM EBITDA: $11.3M. Debt: $45M at close. Hold period: 4 to 6 years. Base/bull/bear assumptions: [revenue growth, margin expansion, exit multiple]. Show MOIC and IRR for each scenario, sensitivity table on exit multiple vs. EBITDA growth, and flag the two assumptions we should pressure-test hardest."
The "flag the two assumptions we should pressure-test hardest" instruction is where the skill earns its keep. A returns model that tells you the bear case IRR is 8% is less useful than one that tells you your returns are almost entirely driven by exit multiple assumptions, and that you should therefore spend diligence time on comparable transaction precedents, not revenue forecasting.
Portfolio Monitoring and Value Creation
The deal sourcing and execution skills cover origination through close. The work that drives actual fund performance happens after close: identifying value creation opportunities, tracking portco performance against the investment thesis, and escalating problems before they become permanent impairments.
"Here are monthly KPIs for our five portcos vs. budget: [paste data]. Flag any metrics more than 10% off budget, identify which variances are one-time vs. structural, and tell me which boards need an agenda item on this at the next meeting."
"Build a value creation plan for [Portco]. Investment thesis: [describe]. Current EBITDA: $8.1M. Target at exit: $14M. Generate the initiative list with estimated EBITDA impact, execution owner, and 12-month milestones for each lever."
Due Diligence: The Connecting Tissue
Across both the IB and PE workflows, due diligence is the phase where the most document synthesis happens, and where AI skills provide the clearest time savings. A due diligence skill processes data room documents systematically: extracting key terms from contracts, flagging change-of-control provisions, summarizing customer agreements, identifying representations and warranties exposure, and producing a structured DD findings document mapped to the IC memo risk section.
The specific value here is completeness. Manual data room review is subject to fatigue and attention drift. The clause buried on page 40 of a customer contract that limits assignment rights gets missed. A skill processing documents systematically doesn't get tired of reading the fifteenth contract.
Setting Up Skills at the Firm Level
The highest-leverage implementation is a shared firm CLAUDE.md that every analyst and associate pulls into their project folders. This file holds:
Fund investment criteria. The specific parameters that define a fundable deal. Not the marketing version in your deck, but the actual thresholds that would disqualify a company. Hard criteria and soft criteria separated clearly.
Document format preferences. The section order and content expectations for your IC memo, CIM, and pitch deck. Senior partners have strong preferences. Encoding them prevents the back-and-forth of "we always put market sizing before the business model overview."
Sector thesis and market views. Your fund's current sector focus, thematic investment hypotheses, and any specific market dynamics you're tracking. This prevents analysts from writing market overviews that contradict your partners' published views.
House style for financial analysis. Preferred valuation methodologies by sector, how you define normalized EBITDA, standard addback policy, return threshold expectations. The methodological consistency that currently lives only in the heads of your most senior people.
A deal-specific file sits alongside the firm CLAUDE.md: company name, deal stage, entry assumptions, current open questions. The skill reads both (firm context plus deal context) for outputs that are simultaneously on-standard and deal-specific.
Getting Started
I publish the full PE and IB toolkit as free, downloadable playbooks at claudecodehq.com. The collection includes IB pitch decks, CIM builder, deal screening, IC memos, returns analysis, deal sourcing, due diligence automation, value creation planning, portfolio monitoring, teasers, process letters, buyer lists, merger models, and deal trackers. Each one is a single CLAUDE.md file you drop into a project folder. Start with whichever stage of the deal cycle currently costs your team the most analyst hours.
Originally published on claudecodehq.com
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