What Is Claude for Small Business? The Complete Guide

Claude for Small Business is a free plugin inside Claude Cowork. It adds 15 ready-to-run workflows that do small business admin work: chasing overdue invoices, closing the month, prepping tax, triaging leads, reviewing contracts and writing you a Monday morning brief. It connects to tools you already pay for, like QuickBooks, PayPal and HubSpot. It costs nothing on top of a paid Claude plan. Anthropic launched it on 13 May 2026.

That is the short answer. The rest of this page is the detail, because most of what has been written about this product since May gets at least one important thing wrong. We know, because we got two things wrong ourselves before we checked.

What it actually is

It helps to be precise about the shape of this thing, because the name makes it sound like a separate product you buy. It is not.

• It is a plugin, not a product. Inside Claude it is called smb-complete. You install it the way you would install an add-on.
• It lives inside Claude Cowork. Cowork is the part of Claude that carries out jobs with many steps, across several apps, and can repeat them on a schedule.
• It is not a new price tier. There is no Claude for Small Business subscription. You pay for a normal paid Claude plan and the plugin is included.
• There is nothing to download beyond the Claude desktop app itself. No new software for your team to learn.

So the honest one-line description is this: Claude already existed, and Anthropic packaged up fifteen common small business jobs as commands you can run.

The 15 workflows, with their real names

This is where nearly every write-up goes wrong, including an early version of ours.

The workflows are slash commands. You type them into Claude. They are not products with marketing names like Invoice Chaser or Cash-Flow View. Those names appear in a lot of blog posts and agency decks, including one we wrote in May, and Anthropic does not use them. Here are the fifteen, exactly as Anthropic names them in its own install guide.

Command	Area	What it is for
/plan-payroll	Money and finance	Builds a 30-day cash forecast, ranks overdue invoices, and drafts a reminder for each one
/month-heads-up	Money and finance	Reads the next 30 days of cash, finds your tightest week, and flags what to watch before month-end
/close-month	Money and finance	Reconciles your books against your payment processor and writes the close packet for your accountant
/price-check	Money and finance	Builds a margin-by-product table and pricing scenarios with break-even math
/tax-prep	Money and finance	Calculates quarterly estimated taxes or builds a year-end 1099 list, formatted for your accountant
/call-list	Sales and marketing	Scores your leads on engagement, fit and urgency, and writes a call card for the top ones
/sales-brief	Sales and marketing	Ranks top and bottom sellers and drafts a content plan that pushes the winners
/run-campaign	Sales and marketing	Reads your sales history, finds the slow stretch, drafts the offer, builds the assets, and stages the send
/handle-complaint	Customers and operations	Reads a customer email, looks up their order and history, and drafts a reply matched to the situation
/customer-pulse-check	Customers and operations	Reads disputes, tickets, emails and reviews and groups them into themes with a draft response for each
/crm-cleanup	Customers and operations	Finds stale deals, duplicate contacts and missing fields. Shows what it found before changing anything
/review-contract	Customers and operations	Reads a contract and writes a plain-English summary, a red-flag list and a marked-up redline
/monday-brief	Business intelligence	One page to start the week: cash, sales trend, pipeline, this week's calendar, and what most needs you today
/friday-brief	Business intelligence	Revenue against last week, what sold, wins and watches
/quarterly-review	Business intelligence	Revenue and margin trends, customer health, opportunities and risks, written as a narrative

Those descriptions are Anthropic's own, lightly trimmed, and so is the grouping. Four buckets, not five: money and finance gets five commands, sales and marketing three, customers and operations four, business intelligence three.

The 15 skills underneath

Below the commands sit 15 building-block skills. You do not call these directly. A command runs one or more of them, and they also switch on by themselves when you ask for something in plain English.

They are a different fifteen from the commands, which trips people up:

• Money: cash-flow-snapshot, invoice-chase, margin-analyzer, month-end-prep, tax-season-organizer
• Sales and marketing: lead-triage, content-strategy, canva-creator
• Customers and operations: ticket-deflector, customer-pulse, crm-maintenance, contract-review
• Briefings: business-pulse
• Hiring and setup: job-post-builder, smb-onboard

Two of those have no slash command at all. job-post-builder writes a job post, a structured interview guide with a scoring rubric, and an offer letter template. smb-onboard is the setup skill: it asks about your business, helps you connect your tools, and saves that context so every other skill knows who you are. Neither needs a connector.

The practical meaning is that you do not have to memorise the commands. You can ask in plain English instead. Something like: which invoices are overdue, and which ones should I follow up on first? The right skills wake up on their own.

What it connects to

Anthropic's launch announcement names seven partner integrations:

• QuickBooks (Intuit): invoices, transactions, cash position
• PayPal: settlements and payments
• HubSpot: contacts, deals, pipeline
• Canva: campaign artwork
• DocuSign: contracts and signatures
• Google Workspace: mail, calendar, documents
• Microsoft 365: the same, for Microsoft shops

Beyond those seven, the plugin can reach Claude's wider connector library, which includes Slack, Gmail, Google Drive and Google Calendar. You will see other tools named in third-party articles. If a tool is not on Anthropic's own list, treat it as unconfirmed until you have seen it work.

You need at least one connected tool for the finance workflows to mean anything. Most businesses start with QuickBooks and their email.

How approvals really work

This is the question every owner asks, and it deserves a straight answer rather than a reassuring one.

Anthropic's wording is: Every task and workflow you run within Claude is initiated by you. You approve the plan first or, when you're ready, let it run end-to-end.

Read that carefully, because it says two things:

• Nothing starts on its own. You kick off every workflow.
• Approval-first is the default, not a hard limit. You approve the plan before it runs. But once you trust a workflow, Anthropic explicitly lets you turn it loose end-to-end.

You will find pages claiming nothing ever sends without your approval, full stop. That is a comfortable thing to say and it is not quite what the product does. The accurate version is better anyway: you control how much control you hand over, and you decide that per workflow, when you are ready.

Our advice to clients is to run everything approval-first for the first month. Read what it drafts. When a workflow has been right thirty times in a row, then think about letting it run.

What it costs

The plugin is free. There is no extra charge for Claude for Small Business. You pay for two things: a paid Claude plan, and whatever business tools you already pay for.

It runs on Pro, Max, Team or Enterprise, and you need the Claude desktop app. It does not run on the free plan. These are Anthropic's prices from claude.com/pricing, and they exclude tax:

Plan	Billed monthly	Billed annually
Pro	$20/month	$17/month
Max	from $100/month	n/a
Team Standard	$25/seat/month	$20/seat/month
Team Premium	$125/seat/month	$100/seat/month

Team is built for 2 to 150 people. A one-person business does not need it. Pro is enough to run the plugin.

One correction worth making loudly, because we published it ourselves and because it is repeated all over the web: you do not need Claude Team at $30 a month per person. Team is $25 a seat billed monthly, or $20 billed annually, and Team is not required at all. The $30 figure is out of date. If a page is quoting it, that page has not been checked since the spring.

How to turn it on

The install itself takes about two minutes. Anthropic's steps:

1. Open Cowork and choose Customize in the sidebar.
2. Under Plugins, click +.
3. Find Small Business in the marketplace.
4. Click Install.

Then tell it about your business, so the workflows are not generic. Ask it to customise the smb-complete plugin for you based on your company.

The two minutes is the easy part. Connecting your accounts, deciding what each workflow should say in your voice, and getting the output to a standard you would actually send a customer is the work. We have a full setup walkthrough here.

What it does not do

Being straight about the limits is how you avoid a disappointed first week.

• It does not touch your bank. It reads business data through official app connections. It is not a payments tool.
• It does not replace your bookkeeper or your accountant. It gets the paperwork into a state where they can do the skilled part faster.
• It is not magic on bad data. If your QuickBooks is a mess and half your leads live in a notebook, the output will reflect that. Cleaning up first is usually the real project.
• It is not set-and-forget on day one. The early drafts need editing. That is the point of approval-first.

Who it actually suits

In our experience the businesses that get the most out of it look like this: between one and fifty people, already paying for QuickBooks or HubSpot or both, with an owner or office manager who loses an afternoon a week to admin they resent. Trades, clinics, agencies, consultancies, local service firms.

The businesses that get least out of it are the ones with almost no digital paper trail, and the ones expecting it to sell for them. It is a back-office tool. It makes the admin behind the selling disappear.

Where we come in

You can do all of this yourself. The plugin is free, the install is four clicks, and Anthropic runs a free course. If you are hands-on, go and do it.

What we sell is the part that is not four clicks. We come into your business, connect your tools with you on the call, configure each workflow to your invoice tone and your lead rules, test them on your real data while you watch, and hand you written procedures your team can follow. It is a premium, done-for-you setup, not a subscription to another piece of software.

If that is what you want, book a call and we will tell you which workflows are worth turning on for your business first, and which ones you can ignore.

Common questions

Is Claude for Small Business free?

The plugin is free. The Claude plan it runs on is not. You need a paid plan, and Pro at $20 a month is the cheapest that works. The free Claude plan will not run it.

How much does Claude for Small Business cost per month?

Nothing on top of your Claude plan. So the honest monthly figure is the price of your plan, from $20 a month for one person on Pro, plus the business tools you already pay for such as QuickBooks or HubSpot.

Do I need Claude Team to use it?

No. It works on Pro, Max, Team and Enterprise. A lot of pages say Team is required at $30 a seat. That is wrong on both counts: Team is not required, and Team is $25 a seat billed monthly or $20 billed annually.

How does Claude for Small Business work?

You install the plugin inside Claude Cowork, connect your business tools, then run one of the 15 workflows as a slash command, or just ask in plain English. Claude prepares the work and shows you the plan. You approve it, edit it, or let it run.

What does it connect to?

Seven partner integrations at launch: QuickBooks, PayPal, HubSpot, Canva, DocuSign, Google Workspace and Microsoft 365. Claude's wider connector library adds others including Slack, Gmail, Google Drive and Google Calendar.

Does it need access to my bank account?

It never gets your bank login, so it cannot drain an account. But "it cannot touch money" is too strong, and you should be careful with anyone who tells you that. Anthropic's own PayPal connector can create invoices, create products, build subscription plans and subscribe a customer to one. Those are actions against your customers' cards, not just reading. If that is not what you want, an owner can set a connector to need approval every time, or block its write actions entirely.

When was it released?

Anthropic announced it on 13 May 2026, alongside a workshop tour that started in Chicago on 14 May and a free online course called AI Fluency for Small Business.

Is there anything to download?

You need the Claude desktop app. Beyond that, no. The plugin is a toggle install inside Cowork. There are no files to configure and no software for your team to learn.