Open standard · MIT

Finance deserves professional standards.

Code has CLAUDE.md. Design has DESIGN.md. Finance still runs on institutional memory — EBITDA definitions in emails, FX policies in heads, restatements explained once on a call.

FINANCE.md is the standard that fixes this. One file. Versioned. Readable by any agent, any tool, any analyst.

Generate yoursView spec

v0.1 draft · Published May 2026

What it looks like

One file. Front matter + prose.

FINANCE.md — front matter
# FINANCE.md
finance_md: "0.1"
model_name: "Distrib SAS — FY2026 budget"
currency: EUR
secondary_units: [tonnes]
language: fr
owners: ["[email protected]"]
sources: [pennylane, manual_excel]
glossary:
  Marge brute commerciale: "Revenue minus purchase cost only. Excludes logistics."
  CA Frais: "Cold-chain revenue — separate margin profile from dry goods."
FINANCE.md — body
## Closing calendar

Books close on the 10th of the following month.
Management review on the 20th.

## Units and sign convention

All amounts in thousands EUR. Costs appear as positive numbers.
Net income = Revenue − Costs (both positive).
An entry of 1 200 means €1.2 million.

## EBITDA

Excludes IFRS16 — French GAAP entity. Operating leases stay above EBITDA as
rent expense. Bank-facing definition, not IFRS.

Front matter is machine-readable. Body is human-readable. Both travel with the model.

Where it lives

Next to your other conventions. At every level.

Alongside
AGENTS.md / CLAUDE.md   — AI and coding conventions
DESIGN.md               — visual and product standards
FINANCE.md              — financial modeling conventions
At each scope
Sector template   FINANCE.md  — PE LBO, SaaS FP&A, infrastructure...
  └── Organization FINANCE.md  — group-wide (currency, language, sources)
        └── Model  FINANCE.md  — deal- or model-specific

An AI agent traverses the hierarchy automatically — it knows which convention applies, at which scope, and why. No re-explanation across sessions.

What you can define

Context, glossary, EBITDA, and more.

  • Model name & currency — the only two facts an agent strictly needs upfront
  • Secondary units — tonnes, SKU, MW, tokens, seats… anything the model tracks alongside money
  • Language — agents reply in your team’s working language by default
  • Owners & sources — who answers the questions, what systems feed the model
  • Glossary — company-specific terms, sector KPIs, redefined metrics
  • Conventions in prose — EBITDA, working capital, FX, net debt, tax: written in the body, not the YAML
  • Rationale — every choice justified next to itself, audit-trail style

Per file. Per team. Per organization.

Read the spec. Or generate yours.

FINANCE.md is open under MIT. Layerz generates one automatically from your model and versions it alongside your model history.

Generate yours — freeView spec