Claude for Small Business: 31 Skills, $20
Claude's small business plugin installs 31 pre-built skills and 12 tool connectors in one click. Here's the setup, the two settings to change first, and what five of the skills actually produced.
The short answer
Claude for small business is a plugin you install inside the Claude desktop app on a Pro plan, and it adds 31 pre-built skills and 12 tool connectors in one click. A skill is a job someone already worked out the steps for, like chasing overdue invoices or building a Monday morning brief. A connector is the bridge that lets Claude read your PayPal, HubSpot, Gmail or calendar directly. You run a skill by typing a forward slash and picking it, and by default Claude asks your permission before it does anything.
At a glance
- Time
- ≈ 15 minutes to set up
- Cost
- Claude Pro
- You need
- The desktop app
- Where
- Customize, then Plugins
You've got invoices to chase.
So you open Claude and ask it to write a follow-up email. It writes a good one. But it doesn't know which client is late, or the amount, or the last time you contacted them.
So you go back to PayPal or QuickBooks or Square, find the late one, pull the numbers, rewrite the email with the real details, and send it yourself.
There's a version of Claude that does all of that for you. It goes into PayPal, finds who's late, reads your email history, drafts the follow-up with real names, real amounts and real dates, and then stops and waits for you to say go.
The part that got my attention: "If you hired someone to do all of this, an assistant, a bookkeeper, someone to run your Monday mornings, you'd pay $5,000 a month, guaranteed."
This is $20 a month.
Watch the video above to see it running on real numbers.
Key takeaways
- 01
One click installs 31 skills and 12 connectors. A skill is a pre-built job with the steps already worked out. A connector is permission for Claude to read one of your existing tools. You aren't building anything, you're switching things on.
- 02
Two settings need changing before you run a single thing. Stay on Sonnet rather than Opus, which burns through usage limits fast, and leave permissions on ask before acting so you see every step before it happens.
- 03
Claude drafts, you send. The invoice skill wrote the follow-up email and put it in Gmail, and it stopped there. Sending was still mine to do, which is the guardrail working as designed.
- 04
Anthropic does not train its models on your business data. Not your PayPal numbers, not your client emails, not your sales pipeline. Claude also respects the permissions each tool already has, so nobody sees through Claude what they couldn't see directly.
- 05
Setup took about 15 minutes, including connecting the tools. Download, install, onboarding conversation, and connecting PayPal and HubSpot. That's the whole barrier.
I filmed this on a completely new account, and that was deliberate.
I tried to record it on my own account first, and Claude already knew far too much about my business. My memory was on. My custom instructions were in there. You'd have been watching a version that had been shaped around me for months.
That's not what you get on day one, and day one is the thing worth showing you.
So everything here is out of the box, before memory, before a business brief, before any of the setup work that makes it better. If this is what it does cold, the version you'll have in three months is a different conversation.
Prefer to watch
21:19Installing it and running your first skill
Get the desktop app
Download the Claude desktop app, because Cowork lives in there and the browser version doesn't have it.
You'll also need a Pro plan. That's the $20 a month everything else in this article sits on top of.
Install the plugin
In the left sidebar, hit Customize, then Plugins, then browse.
Search for small business. It's built by Anthropic. Hit install.
That's the whole installation. One click, and 31 skills and 12 connectors land in your account.
Change two settings before you run anything
This is the step to not skip.
Check your model first. Opus sits at the top of the list and you shouldn't use it here, because it'll burn through your usage limits fast. Stay on Sonnet.
Then check the permission setting. It should default to ask before acting, and you should leave it there. There's an option to let it run without asking. Don't touch that until you know exactly what you're doing.
Run the onboarding
Type forward slash smb onboard and run it.
If you're unsure what a command does, hover its tooltip.
It'll tell you it has no tools connected yet, and that this will take 15 to 20 minutes. Then it asks what your biggest day to day headaches are. Mine were following up on invoices, marketing to previous clients, and cash flow visibility.
It came straight back and told me to prioritise my accounting and customer tools.
Connect your first tool
I said I use PayPal and HubSpot, and it started connecting them.
Click connect, and it opens a browser window to sign into that tool the way you normally would. On HubSpot, scroll down to connect app, which is easy to miss. Then a pop-up appears to take you back to the desktop app and you click open.
It then builds a profile: what kind of business you run, how many employees, what tools you use, and whether you want to check in daily, weekly, or only when you ask.
Check the profile over before you say yes. Once you approve it, every skill knows your business.
Run your first skill
Every skill is a forward slash. You don't write instructions, you pick the process and it runs.
Start with forward slash business pulse. It pulls your PayPal balance, your invoices and your sales pipeline into one page, with a cash and finance snapshot, your priorities, what you need to do this week and what to watch for.
It also shows you where it pulled each piece from.
Schedule the Monday brief and pin it
Ask Claude to schedule the Monday brief and it does it, then shows you the scheduled task under schedule in the left sidebar. Mine runs at 7am Monday.
It warned me that's peak time and my usage would be higher, so you can just tell it to move to 3am instead.
Then ask for it as a live artifact. Instead of sitting in a chat window it becomes a dashboard, pinned to your sidebar, pulling fresh data every time you open it.
Five skills, and what each one gave back
Invoice Chase
It showed me which invoice to follow up on, exactly how overdue it was, and whether this client is a repeat offender.
Then it picked a tone to match. Good payers get a gentle nudge. Repeat late payers get a firmer one. It reads your payment history to decide.
It wrote the email and put it in my Gmail. It did not send it. That's mine to do.
You'd never do that tone calculation manually for every invoice. That's the point of it.
Call List
This one went through HubSpot, my Gmail and my calendar and decided who I should be calling, and which potential customers were worth my time.
It gave me the list, talking points for each one, and suggested the times in my calendar to block off for the calls.
I asked it to add them, and it did. I never touched any of those tools. Claude touched all of them.
Business Pulse
Overview, cash and finance snapshot, priorities, revenue and sales, pipeline, what I need to do this week, what I should be watching for.
All on one page, from a demo account with nothing in it but what the connectors gave it.
Job Post Builder
Posting a job has a lot of moving parts. What the job actually is, what you're offering, what to ask in the interview.
It asked me a couple of questions and the format I wanted, then went out and researched what those jobs look like in my area right now.
What came back was the job post, an interview guide, and the offer letter. From a couple of answers.
Canva Creator
This one took minutes rather than seconds, and it does the most.
You tell it what you're selling and where you want it to show up. Instagram, Facebook, your email list. It decides what to post, which days, and how many posts to make.
Then it goes into Canva and makes the actual images. Not suggestions, images. Eight designs with four options each, then captions written for every one, then the whole thing queued into a schedule, dated and ready, with nothing publishing until you say so.
The only thing it needed from me that it couldn't work out itself was my call to action and booking link. And Canva free works fine here. You don't need Pro.
Sources
Questions people actually ask
What do I need to use Claude for small business?+
A Claude Pro plan and the Claude desktop app. At the time I recorded this it doesn't work in the browser, because the plugin lives inside Cowork and Cowork is desktop only.
Does Claude train on my business data?+
No. Anthropic does not train the models on your business data. Not your PayPal numbers, not your client emails, not your sales pipeline. Their trust center is linked above so you can read the detail yourself.
Is my data safe if other people use my tools?+
Claude respects the permissions you've already set in each tool. If an employee can't see something in Gmail or DocuSign today, they can't see it through Claude either.
How long does the setup actually take?+
Mine was about 15 minutes, and that covered the download, the install, the onboarding conversation and connecting two tools. The onboarding itself says to allow 15 to 20 minutes.
Can it send emails for me?+
It drafts them into your Gmail and stops. Sending is still your job, and by default you approve every action before it moves forward. That's a guardrail, not a limitation.
Which model should I use?+
Sonnet. Opus sits at the top of the list and it'll burn through your usage limits quickly on this kind of work. Change it before you run your first skill, not after.
How many tools can I connect?+
Twelve, which is what ships with the install. At the time of recording you can't add connectors beyond those twelve, though that may well change. To check what any of them can access, go to Customize, then Connectors, and click the one you want.
How is this different from just asking Claude a question?+
Everything's already there. Your tools are connected, Claude knows what to look for, and the steps for each job are already worked out. You describe what you want done rather than how to do it, and it asks before it acts.
About the author
Hey, I'm Traci
Digital Marketing Strategist
With over 25 years in this industry I help small business owners and creators turn their online presence into profit.
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