Claude for Small Business,
decoded for the rest of us.
Anthropic just launched the biggest small business AI release of the year. Here's every connector and every skill, plus how to install it, in plain English.
What Anthropic actually launched.
On 13 May, Anthropic launched Claude for Small Business. It's a plugin you install inside Claude Cowork. Once it's on, Claude can read, draft, plan, send and reconcile across the tools you already use, with you approving every action before anything sends, posts or pays.
Inside the plugin: 15 workflows you can trigger with a slash command, plus 15 underlying skills they chain together. Grouped into five areas: money and finance, sales and marketing, customers and operations, business intelligence, and hiring and setup. No extra cost on a Pro, Max or Team Claude plan.
Think of it less as "an AI you chat to" and more as an operator that lives inside your business.
For two years the AI conversation has been about prompts. How to write them, how to phrase them, how to "speak AI." This launch is the proof that the real shift was never about prompts. It was about where the AI lives, and what it can touch.
The seven tools it plugs straight into.
These are the tools Anthropic built native integrations for. If you use any of them, Claude can now work directly inside them. Permissions you already have carry over, so Claude only sees what your account is already allowed to see.
QuickBooks
Payroll planning, monthly close, cash flow forecasting, reconciliation and tax-season prep.
Anyone with bookkeepingPayPal
Settlements, invoicing, disputes and refunds, surfaced and managed inside Claude.
Retreat hosts, coaches, consultantsHubSpot
Lead triage, customer pulse, campaign attribution. Claude reads your CRM and tells you who to follow up with.
Anyone with an enquiry formCanva
Generate content for every channel, collaborate and edit with your team, publish assets, track performance.
Content creators, course sellersDocusign
Send contracts for signature, track status, file the executed copy back where it belongs.
Coaches, agencies, freelancersGoogle Workspace
Gmail, Drive, Calendar and Docs, all readable and writable by Claude with your existing permissions intact.
Almost everyoneMicrosoft 365
Outlook, Word, Excel and Teams. Same idea as Google Workspace if you live on the Microsoft side.
Small business on MicrosoftPlus the extras
Slack, Stripe, Square, Webflow, Gmail, Calendar and Drive all live inside the same plugin. Hook them up to whichever tools your business actually runs on.
Included on paid plans15 workflows. 15 skills. Five areas.
The 15 workflows are slash commands you can trigger directly, like /plan-payroll or /monday-brief. Each one runs a chain of underlying skills under the hood, so a bigger job is still one ask. Type / in the chat to pick a workflow from a menu, or describe the job in plain English and Claude picks the right one. Here's the full list, grouped by area.
01 · Money and finance
The bookkeeping that piles up.
Plan your payroll
Builds a 30-day cash forecast, ranks overdue invoices, and drafts a reminder for each one.
If you pay staff or contractorsSpot the tight week
Reads the next 30 days of cash, finds your tightest week, and flags what to watch before month-end.
Solo founders who hate surprisesClose the month
Reconciles your books against your payment processor and writes the close packet for your accountant.
Anyone who dreads month-endCheck your pricing
Builds a margin-by-product table and pricing scenarios with break-even math. Shows the numbers, you decide what to charge.
Anyone with multiple offersTax season, sorted
Calculates quarterly estimated taxes or builds a year-end 1099 list, formatted for your accountant.
Everyone running a business02 · Sales and marketing
The growth work that won't sit still.
Today's call list
Scores your leads on engagement, fit and urgency, and writes a call card for the top ones with talking points.
Coaches, consultants, agenciesWhat's selling, what isn't
Ranks top and bottom sellers and drafts a content plan that pushes the winners.
Anyone with multiple offersRun a campaign end-to-end
Finds the slow stretch, drafts the offer, builds the assets in Canva, and stages the send.
Course creators, retreat hosts03 · Customers and operations
The admin that eats your evenings.
Reply to a tricky email
Reads a customer email, looks up their order and history, and drafts a reply matched to the situation.
Anyone with customersRead the room
Reads disputes, tickets, emails and reviews and groups them into themes with a draft response for each.
Small business with feedback to actionTidy your CRM
Finds stale deals, duplicate contacts and missing fields. Shows what it found before changing anything.
Anyone with a messy contact listWalk me through this contract
Plain-English summary, a red-flag list, and a marked-up redline of any contract you upload.
Retreat operators, agencies, coaches04 · Business intelligence
The numbers you've been meaning to look at.
Start the week clear
One page to start the week: cash, sales trend, pipeline, this week's calendar, and what most needs you today.
Solo founders who want clarityClose the week
Revenue against last week, what sold, wins and watches.
Anyone running a tight weekQBR written for you
Revenue and margin trends, customer health, opportunities and risks. Written as a narrative.
Founders who want a quarterly habit05 · Hiring and setup
The setup work you keep putting off.
Write a job post
Writes a job post, a structured interview guide with a scoring rubric, and an offer letter template.
Anyone hiring contractors or VAsRun this first
The setup skill. Asks about your business, helps you connect tools, and saves your context so every other skill knows it.
Run this on day oneUnderneath these workflows are the 15 base skills (cash-flow-snapshot, invoice-chase, margin-analyzer, lead-triage, content-strategy, canva-creator, customer-pulse, ticket-deflector, crm-maintenance, contract-review, business-pulse, month-end-prep, tax-season-organizer, and the two hiring skills above). The slash command workflows chain these together. You can also call any base skill directly if you want a single step instead of the whole flow.
Three steps, under ten minutes.
You need the Claude desktop app on a Pro, Max or Team plan. If you're on the free Claude tier, you'll need to upgrade first (Pro starts at around AUD $30 a month).
Open Customize.
Inside the Claude desktop app, click Customize in the left sidebar.
Go to Plugins, hit the +.
In the Customize panel, click Plugins, then hit the + button to browse. Find Small Business (source: Anthropic and Partners). Click Install.
Run /smb-onboard first.
Type /smb-onboard in the chat. Claude asks about your business and saves your context so every other skill knows who you are.
Two ways to run a skill
Type a slash command
Open the chat, type / and pick the skill from the list. Like ordering off a menu.
Describe it in plain English
Just say what you want done. Claude reads your prompt and picks the skill that fits.
Claude desktop app on a Pro, Max or Team plan. Plus accounts in whichever partner tools you want to connect (QuickBooks, PayPal, HubSpot, Canva, Docusign, Google Workspace, Microsoft 365). Some features depend on your tier in the connected tool, the skill will tell you if so.
Don't memorise commands. Just talk to it.
You don't need to remember any slash command. Once the plugin is installed, you can describe the job in plain English and Claude picks the right skill for you. A few real prompts that work:
It's not magic. Here's what to know.
A few honest notes before you install. None of them are deal-breakers, but worth knowing upfront.
You still drive.
Every action is initiated by you. Claude prepares the work and shows you what it found. Nothing sends, posts or pays until you say so.
You still need systems.
If your business is chaotic, plugging in AI just makes the chaos run faster. The owners winning here are the ones with their data, files and workflows already in order.
Permissions hold.
If you can't see something in QuickBooks today, Claude can't see it either. Your existing access settings carry over to every skill.
It's US-first.
The launch is heavily skewed to US tools (QuickBooks, PayPal). If you're in Australia using Xero, you can still use the underlying Claude product, just not these specific connectors yet.
Why I decoded this for you.
Every time Anthropic ships something, the rest of the internet writes about it for developers. They explain it in jargon. They benchmark it against other models. They debate the architecture.
And the women I work with, who are the actual small business owners this thing was built for, are left squinting at it wondering if it's for them.
It is. That's the short answer. And the longer answer is in this page.
If you read the whole thing, install the plugin and run smb-onboard, you'll have something working for you by the end of the week. If you do nothing else, you'll at least know what just shipped and how to talk about it.
That's the win. Either way.
xx Jacqui
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