business-case

business-case (Claude Code skill)

Author interactive financial business cases by talking to Claude Code. The skill clones the CBAgent template, writes project.config.js from your description, and tells you how to run and share it.

Install

In Claude Code:

/plugin marketplace add TeleiosPtyLtd/business-case-skill
/plugin install business-case@teleios

Use

Once installed, just describe a decision:

"Build a business case for replacing our annotation pipeline with an AI-assisted workflow. $250k upfront cost, we expect to save ~$60k/month on vendor fees once Phase 2 lands six months in. Model it monthly over 18 months."

Claude will:

1. Clone the template into ./<short-slug>/.
2. Pick a granularity (day / week / month / quarter / year) and horizon (integer count of those periods) that matches how you think about the decision.
3. Author project.config.js — assumptions, items (costs/benefits), three scenarios (Conservative / Central / Optimistic), per-assumption sensitivity ranges, plain-language risk titles.
4. Start live-server so the browser opens with hot reload.
5. Tell you how to click Share to upload the snapshot to a hosted backend and get a password-protected viewer URL.

What's inside the model

• Net cumulative + payback period as the headline. The page is nominal cashflows over your chosen timescale: "you net $X over the next {horizon}", "payback at period N".
• Granularity-native authoring — every assumption and every benefit/cost formula is expressed per-period in the case's chosen unit. No annualising, no monthly-vs-yearly fudging mid-case.
• Item deferral — a benefit that kicks in five months late uses startPeriod: 6. No ramp curves to tune; the timing is explicit.
• Three scenarios with per-assumption overrides — Conservative / Central / Optimistic.
• Sensitivity tornado ranking the top 5 assumptions by net-cumulative swing.
• Hover-aware stacked bar charts, timeline view, full data tables, and per-section drill-downs.
• Sandboxed formula compiler — every assumption is a numeric input you edit live; every cost/benefit value is a JS expression referencing those inputs.
• Config validator — surfaces a banner when identifiers don't resolve, required fields are missing, or legacy schema fields are present.

What's outside

This is decision-support, not an audit-grade financial model. The engine doesn't model: NPV / IRR / discounted cashflow (deliberate — see below), tax shields, depreciation/amortisation, inflation (real vs nominal), working capital, capex/opex distinction, or Monte Carlo simulation. If your CFO needs any of those, take the snapshot into Excel for the final pass.

Why no NPV? Most small/medium-business decisions are read in nominal dollars over a horizon the buyer already has in mind. The discount rate adds a knob nobody wants to defend and an answer that's harder to talk about. The page's job is to be readable end-to-end on one pass, not to satisfy a finance textbook. If you genuinely need NPV, model in your CFO's spreadsheet.

Repo layout

business-case-skill/
├── .claude-plugin/
│   ├── plugin.json          # plugin metadata
│   └── marketplace.json     # marketplace manifest (teleios)
├── skills/
│   └── business-case/
│       └── SKILL.md         # the skill itself (frontmatter + authoring guide)
└── README.md

Self-hosting the share backend

The skill wires uploads to https://models.teleios.au/api/share by default (Teleios's hosted instance of business-case-server). To point at your own deployment, edit share.config.js in any cloned business case:

window.CBAGENT_SHARE_ENDPOINT = "https://your-host.example.com/api/share";