The 15 Claude Small Business Skills (And Why They Are Not the 15 Workflows)

Claude for Small Business has 15 slash commands and 15 skills. Those are two different lists of fifteen. It is not one list counted twice. The commands are what you type. The skills are what does the work. Thirteen of the fifteen skills sit under a command. Two of them have no command at all.

Almost every write-up online merges the two lists into one. That is the mistake we want to clear up here. If you have already read our guide to the 15 workflows, this is the layer underneath it. If you are starting from scratch, our plain-English explainer covers what the plugin is first.

We are ES Studios. We set this plugin up for small businesses as a done-for-you service, so we spend a lot of time in the parts most people skim. Everything below comes from Anthropic's own install tutorial on Claude Academy and its launch announcement. Nothing here is invented.

A command is what you type. A skill is what runs.

Think of it like a kitchen.

• A skill is one recipe. It is a written set of instructions for one job. It knows the steps, so you do not have to spell them out.
• A command is an order ticket. You type /plan-payroll and it fires two recipes in a row, stopping to ask you things in between.

Anthropic puts it this way in the tutorial: "Some skills in this plugin run a few of the others in sequence, asking for your decision between steps, so a bigger job is still one ask."

That is why the counts do not line up neatly. One skill can serve several commands. business-pulse alone is behind three of them. And two skills, job-post-builder and smb-onboard, sit outside the command list entirely.

All 15 skills, what each does, and what it reads

The descriptions below are Anthropic's own words, lightly trimmed. The "reads from" column is the default set of connectors for that skill.

Skill	What it does	Reads from
cash-flow-snapshot	Reads cash, invoices, bills and incoming settlements, then builds a 30/60/90-day forecast with the tight weeks flagged.	QuickBooks, PayPal
invoice-chase	Ranks overdue invoices and drafts a reminder for each one, matched to how that customer has paid before.	QuickBooks, PayPal
margin-analyzer	Builds a margin-by-product table and pricing scenarios with break-even math. It shows the numbers. You decide what to charge.	QuickBooks, PayPal
month-end-prep	Reconciles your books against your payment processor, flags what is off, and writes the close packet for your accountant.	QuickBooks, PayPal
tax-season-organizer	Calculates quarterly estimated taxes, or builds a year-end 1099 list, formatted for your accountant.	QuickBooks, PayPal
lead-triage	Scores your leads on engagement, fit and urgency, and writes a call card for the top ones with talking points.	HubSpot
content-strategy	Reads your sales data, finds what is selling and what is not, and drafts a content plan that pushes the winners.	QuickBooks or PayPal
canva-creator	Builds the campaign from a brief: posting calendar, social designs, captions and a staged email.	Canva, HubSpot
ticket-deflector	Reads a customer email, looks up their order and history, and drafts a reply matched to the situation.	PayPal, HubSpot, Gmail
customer-pulse	Reads disputes, tickets, emails and reviews, then groups them into themes with the most fixable problems first.	PayPal or HubSpot
crm-maintenance	Finds stale deals, duplicate contacts and missing fields. Shows what it found before changing anything.	HubSpot
contract-review	Reads a contract and writes a plain-English summary, a red-flag list and a marked-up redline.	Uploaded file. DocuSign optional
business-pulse	One page: cash, sales trend, pipeline, this week's calendar, and the things that most need your attention.	Whatever is connected
job-post-builder	Writes a job post, a structured interview guide with a scoring rubric, and an offer letter template.	No connector required
smb-onboard	The setup skill. Asks about your business, helps you connect tools, and saves your context so every other skill knows it.	No connector required

One thing worth saying loudly: those connectors are defaults, not requirements. Anthropic's tutorial says you can point a skill at the tools you actually use, such as a different payment processor, accounting tool or CRM, and the skill reads from those instead. So a business on Xero is not locked out. It just needs the plugin customised.

Which command runs which skill

Here is the map. Read it left to right: you type the thing on the left, and the things on the right do the work.

Command	Runs these skills
/plan-payroll	cash-flow-snapshot, invoice-chase
/month-heads-up	cash-flow-snapshot
/close-month	month-end-prep
/price-check	margin-analyzer
/tax-prep	tax-season-organizer
/call-list	lead-triage
/sales-brief	content-strategy
/run-campaign	content-strategy, canva-creator, lead-triage
/handle-complaint	ticket-deflector, customer-pulse
/customer-pulse-check	customer-pulse, ticket-deflector
/crm-cleanup	crm-maintenance
/review-contract	contract-review
/monday-brief	business-pulse
/friday-brief	business-pulse
/quarterly-review	business-pulse

Count the different skills in that right-hand column and you get thirteen, not fifteen. Some of them appear more than once. business-pulse is the busiest on the list: three commands, one recipe, three different time windows. The Monday version looks forward at the week. The Friday version looks back at it. The quarterly version writes the quarter as a story.

/run-campaign is the other one to notice. It chains three skills into a single ask: work out what to push, build the assets, then line up who to send it to. That is the closest thing in the plugin to handing over a whole project rather than a task.

The two skills with no slash command

This is the part most articles miss completely. Two skills have no command in front of them. You reach them by asking in plain English.

job-post-builder

It writes a job post, a structured interview guide with a scoring rubric, and an offer letter template. No connector needed, because it is not reading your books. It writes from what you tell it.

Anthropic files it under "Hiring and setup" and gives an example prompt in the tutorial: "Help me hire a part-time bookkeeper, write the post and the interview guide." That is the whole trick. You do not type a command. You describe the job.

For a small business this is quietly one of the most useful things in the plugin. Hiring is the task owners put off longest, and a scoring rubric is exactly the bit nobody builds on their own.

smb-onboard

This is the setup skill. It asks about your business, helps you connect your tools, and saves your context so every other skill knows it. Run it once, properly, and the other fourteen skills stop guessing about your industry, your team size and your priorities.

One caveat, and we would rather flag it than paper over it. Anthropic's plugin listing page does show a /smb-onboard command. The install tutorial does not. We cannot confirm which is current, so treat the command as unconfirmed and use plain English or the Customize screen instead. The tutorial's own instruction is to type this into the chat bar:

Customize the "smb-complete" plugin for me based on my company.

smb-complete is the plugin's internal name. That prompt is the documented route, so it is the one we use with clients.

Why this matters when you actually use it

Here is the practical payoff. You do not have to memorise fifteen commands.

Skills fire on their own from ordinary questions. Anthropic's tutorial spells out the habit: describe the job in plain words, with no skill name, and Claude picks the skill that fits. Its own examples read like things a real owner would say.

• "Which invoices are open and which ones should I follow up on?"
• "What does cash look like for the next 60 days?"
• "Who should I call first today?"
• "A customer wrote about a late shipment. Help me draft a reply."
• "Walk me through this NDA before I sign it."

None of those contain a command. All of them land on a skill.

So what are the commands for? Certainty. If what comes back is not the job you meant, type / and pick the skill yourself. The command is the precise version. Plain English is the fast version.

There is a second payoff. Once you know the skills sit underneath, you can ask for one piece of a workflow instead of the whole chain. You do not need all of /run-campaign if the only thing you want today is the designs. Ask for the designs and canva-creator handles that part.

One more thing worth knowing before you run anything. Anthropic's tutorial is clear that skills draft, propose and stage, and nothing sends, posts or pays until you approve it. It also notes your existing tool permissions still hold: Claude reads what your account can already read, and nothing more.

Common questions

Are the 15 skills and the 15 workflows the same thing?

No. They are two different lists that happen to be the same length. The workflows are slash commands you type. The skills are the instruction sets those commands run. Thirteen skills cover the fifteen commands, and two skills have no command at all.

Do I need to learn the skill names?

No. Ask your question in plain English and Claude picks the skill. The names are useful for two things: knowing what the plugin can actually do, and asking for one specific piece when a full command would do too much.

Which skills work without connecting any tools?

job-post-builder and smb-onboard need no connector. contract-review works from a file you upload, with DocuSign as an optional extra. Every other skill reads from QuickBooks, PayPal, HubSpot, Canva or Gmail, and has very little to say without them.

What if I use Xero, or a CRM that is not HubSpot?

The connectors listed are defaults. Anthropic says you can point a skill at the tools you actually use, including a different accounting tool, payment processor or CRM. It is a customisation job rather than a blocker. How much work it takes depends on how heavily that skill leans on the connector.

Is there a hiring workflow?

Yes, but not as a command. job-post-builder writes the job post, the interview guide with a scoring rubric, and an offer letter template. Ask for it in plain English.

Why do three commands all run business-pulse?

Because they are the same report over different time windows. /monday-brief starts the week, /friday-brief closes it, and /quarterly-review covers the quarter as a narrative. One skill, three framings.

Does any of this cost extra?

No. The Small Business plugin is included with a paid Claude plan. You pay for your Claude seat and for whatever partner tools you already use. Pro, Max, Team and Enterprise all work. The free plan does not get it.

Getting the skills tuned to your business

Installing the plugin takes about two minutes. Getting fifteen skills reading clean data, from the right connectors, in your context, is a different job. That is the part that decides whether your first Monday brief is useful or just noise.

That is what ES Studios does as a done-for-you service. We connect the tools, run the setup skill against your real numbers, check the first outputs against your own books, and hand you the short list of skills worth running every week. If you would rather do it yourself, start with smb-onboard and give it honest answers. Every other skill reads what it saves.