The Day the Spreadsheet Died: How Claude Code Rewired Finance at Gusto and Tide

Key takeaways from Village Global's conversation with Jeff Cobourn (finance, business ops and strategy at Gusto) and Rohit DivateDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → (VP of Finance at Tide) (August 2026):

An inflection in the last few months. Both say AI only truly accelerated their finance work over the past three to four months. Earlier ChatGPT/Claude use was limited to writing and research; the models couldn't be used for actual modelling until recently.

February 3rd, the day it changed. Cobourn pinpoints the exact date his Gusto team got access to Claude Code. Roughly 90% of the team's day is now spent in Claude Code, running multiple sessions to accomplish different tasks.

Board decks as pull requests. A board deck that once took two weeks and five people — updating slides, Google Sheets backups, reconciling data — now runs as pull requests in GitHub against an HTML file with the same functionality and inline editing.

Spreadsheets on the way out. Recurring financial models are being migrated from Google Sheets into Python-backed web pages hooked directly to the data warehouse. New analysis is built with Claude Code as web pages rather than spreadsheets.

Tableau replaced. The team used Tableau and Redash for BI; Divate has rebuilt his daily dashboard in a Google Apps Script dashboard via Claude Code and no longer uses Tableau for visuals — richer experiences come from HTML pages hosted on Switchboard, Streamlit or Apps Script.

Fundamentals still matter. Both stress you still need to know how to build — the scaffolding, relationships and lookups learned from years of spreadsheet modelling — to direct Claude Code and know whether an output is right. They push back on claims that finance modelling skills are now obsolete.

Read more: Village Global