Research Finance
Budget and finance research with every assumption surfaced; capitalize-vs-expense calls route to a named finance owner.
Before & after
Same prompt, same agent — the only difference is the skill.
Building an R&D budget requires thinking about your team size, infrastructure costs, and how long you expect the program to run. You'd want to project headcount growth, estimate server and compute costs, and account for any external services or data you'll need. You'll probably want a contingency buffer. Some costs are direct (salaries, cloud) and some are indirect overhead. I'd recommend building this in a spreadsheet and testing different scenarios. How many people do you plan to hire? What's your expected compute spend? Do you have any major milestones that need specific resources? Once you tell me more, I can help you structure the budget.
R&D PROGRAM BUDGET — 24 months Program goal: Develop production ML model for customer churn prediction Start date: August 2026 BUDGET OVERVIEW: Year 1 (Aug 2026 - Jul 2027): 1,240,000 Year 2 (Aug 2027 - Jul 2028): 1,580,000 Total: 2,820,000 DIRECT COSTS (70% of budget): Headcount: 1,240,000 Lead researcher (Year 1-2): 180,000 2 senior ML engineers (year 1-2): 360,000 1 junior engineer (year 2 start): 120,000 Data engineer (year 1-2): 160,000 Salary growth 3% annual: included Compute/infrastructure: 420,000 Cloud GPU spend (AWS/GCP): 240,000 Data storage and pipelines: 120,000 Software licenses: 60,000 INDIRECT COSTS — F&A (30% of direct): 498,000 Allocated at 30% rate per institutional policy ASSSUMPTIONS DOCUMENTED: • Hiring 3 headcount by month 6 • GPU utilization 60% during training phases • 15% cost reduction from cloud volume commitments in year 2 • Assumes no major turnover VALUE INFLECTION MILESTONES: Month 6: Data pipeline validated (go/no-go decision point) Month 12: Model achieves 92% accuracy on holdout set Month 18: Production deployment in 3 customer accounts Month 24: Model improving customer retention by 5% minimum BURN RATE: 103,300 monthly average (year 1), 131,700 (year 2) Runway: Full 24 months funded. Recommend milestone reviews every quarter. NOTE: This budget analysis is for planning purposes only, not accounting guidance. Route capitalize-vs-expense decisions to finance team for final treatment.
About this skill
name: research-finance description: Use when Use when managing the money for an internal R&D program or portfolio — building a multi-period program budget with the F&A (indirect) split, tracking burn rate and runway against value-inflection m...
Research Finance
Use when managing the money for an internal R&D program or portfolio — building a multi-period program budget with the F&A (indirect) split, tracking burn rate and runway against value-inflection milestones, or routing R&D cost items to a capitalize-vs-expense determination. Every budget output surfaces its assumptions block; capitalize-vs-expense is decision-support only and routes to a named finance owner — it never books an entry or decides accounting treatment. Distinct from finance/financial-analysis (corporate DCF, close, valuation) and research/grants (funding discovery — this manages money already won).
What you get
- Public GitHub repo (alirezarezvani/claude-skills)
- the research-finance skill folder with SKILL.md. Part of a 337-skill / 30-agent / 70-command install.
Customize your output
- Fork the repo and adapt the skill's instructions and references to your workflow.
Example output
Activates automatically when your request matches Research Finance; chains with the other skills, agents, and commands in the collection.
Best for
Creators, builders, and teams using Claude Code.
SKILL.md preview
---
name: research-finance
description: Use when managing the money for an internal R&D program or portfolio, building program budgets, tracking burn rate and runway, or routing R&D costs to a capitalize-vs-expense determination.
version: 1.0.0
category: Research & Data / Research
author: AgentVolt
license: proprietary
tags:
- research-data
- research
---
# Research Finance
Every budget output surfaces its assumptions block; capitalize-vs-expense is decision-support only and routes to a named finance owner — it never books an entry or decides accounting treatment.
## When to use
… (sign up to view the full skill)More research & data skills
View all Research & Data skills →Research
Default entry point for any research request: classifies the question deterministically and either routes to a specialist skill, such as trends and sentiment.
Research Ops Skills
Use when planning, funding, scoping, or synthesizing enterprise research across workstreams — clinical study design, R&D program finance, market sizing/surveys, or product/user research.
Grants
NIH grant research skill for clinical researchers.
Pulse
Multi-source recency research skill that takes the pulse of any topic across Reddit, Hacker News, the open web, and optionally X/Twitter within a configurable recent window (default 30 days).