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A free guide by Mariah Brunner ↗ INSTAGRAM ↗ TIKTOK

5 Claude Updates
Worth Using

Claude shipped a lot in September. Here are the five that change how you work, who can turn each one on today, and a free weekly-brief skill to put the best one to work.

$4 / $20

Opus 5.5 per million tokens in and out, 20% under Opus 5

43

Small business workflows now built into Claude

1

Conversation for chat, Cowork, Docs, Slides and Design

Two of these you can switch on in ten minutes. Two need an admin or a developer. One is still rolling out. I have marked each so you do not go hunting for a button that is not there yet.

Plans, quickly

Opus models need Pro ($20/mo), Max, Team or Enterprise. The free plan gets Sonnet and Haiku. Everything else below is on paid plans only. Prices and availability checked 23 September 2026.

1. Opus 5.5, Your New Default

Opus 5.5 landed on 22 September at $4 per million input tokens and $20 per million output. That is 20% under Opus 5 on list price, and roughly 40% less on a normal workload once you count how few tokens it burns. It also writes more than 30% faster.

One thing to get right: Opus 5.5 is not the top of the lineup. Fable 5.1 still sits above it for the hardest reasoning and longest agent runs. Opus 5.5 does beat Fable on several coding benchmarks at under half the price, so Anthropic's own advice is to start on Opus 5.5 and move up only when your work falls short.

How to switch: pick it from the model dropdown in the composer at claude.ai. Anthropic also raised the five-hour usage limits on Pro, Max and Team with this launch.

Do this today: take the three longest jobs you normally hand to Fable and re-run them on Opus 5.5. If the quality holds, your cost on that work drops by more than half.

2. One Claude Instead Of Two

On 16 September, chat and Cowork became one Claude. You no longer pick a mode before you start. Claude works out what a task needs and pulls the agent side in on its own, carrying your context, skills and connectors with it.

Two new things came with it. Claude Docs writes a document with you inside the conversation, and Claude Slides drafts a deck in the same thread. Claude Design, standalone since April, now works in conversations too. Edit the output in place, present from Claude, or download it as PowerPoint or PDF.

Availability. Pro and Max get it first across web, desktop and mobile, with Team and Free after. All three tools are in beta. Nothing to enable, it arrives on its own.

Do this today: point Claude at a folder of scattered notes from the last quarter and say "write the client recap the way I usually do it. Flag anything that slipped, then put the highlights into five slides." You get the document and the deck out of one thread, and you can download the deck straight into PowerPoint.

3. Claude For Small Business

This is the one most people here will get the most out of. On 15 September Anthropic expanded Claude for Small Business to 43 workflows and added 27 new integrations.

Connected tools now include Shopify, Stripe, Square, PayPal, QuickBooks, Xero, Gusto, HubSpot, TikTok, Canva, Notion, Zapier, Docusign, Google Workspace, Microsoft 365 and monday.com. The workflows cover weekly financial briefs, lead qualification, proposal drafting, social content and bookkeeping reconciliation. The Monday Brief alone can pull from 37 connectors.

  1. Open the Claude Cowork desktop app and type /smb-onboard.
  2. Connect the two or three tools your money actually runs through. Stripe or Shopify, your bank or bookkeeping, and your email.
  3. Pick a workflow and run it once by hand before you trust it on a schedule.

It asks first

Actions run with approval controls, so Claude checks with you before it changes anything in a connected tool. Available on every paid plan. Team is the one to be on if more than one person needs it.

4. Projects That Run Themselves

Projects in Claude Code arrived on 17 September. You give it a goal, it scopes the work, splits it across parallel threads, and reviews and assembles what comes back. Each thread is a full cloud session with its own copy of the work, so it can keep running after you shut your laptop.

Read this before you go looking for it. This is Claude Code, the developer tool. It is not the Projects feature in your chat sidebar, and the two are unrelated for now. It is in beta for selected Pro and Max users on cloud sessions, widening to Team and Enterprise later. If you do not write code, there is nothing to switch on yet, and the chat version is the one to wait for. Anthropic also warns that projects eat usage limits faster, because several threads run at once.

5. Salesforce Inside Claude

Salesforce in Claude opened in beta on 15 September, out of the Claudeforce partnership announced in August. It ships with 37 pre-built sales skills and runs on two connectors: Salesforce for your CRM records, and Slack for the deal channels where the real context lives.

It writes your daily briefing, preps a call by assembling account history from the CRM and the Slack thread at once, scores deals, and drafts the follow-up and the record update afterwards. It runs inside your existing Salesforce permissions and asks before changing a record.

You cannot turn this on yourself. A Salesforce admin requests access through AgentExchange, then your Claude admin adds the credentials under Organization settings, Connectors, Salesforce (Beta). If your company runs Sales Cloud, forward this to whoever owns it and ask for a three-person pilot.

The Weekly Brief Skill

Number three is the one you can use today, and the Monday Brief is the best thing in it. This version reads the change instead of reporting it, refuses to guess a number it cannot see, and ends with three decisions instead of a wall of charts.

Monday Brief (SKILL.md)
--- name: monday-brief description: Runs my weekly business brief. Use every Monday, or when I ask for a weekly brief, a business check-in, or "how did last week go". Pulls sales, cash, customers and marketing from my connected tools, compares against the prior week, and hands me a one-page brief with three decisions to make. --- # Monday Brief You are my operations partner. Once a week you look at my whole business, tell me what actually changed, and give me a short list of things to decide. You are direct and specific. You do not pad. ## Before you start Read the CONFIG block. If any of it is blank, ask me once, then remember my answers for future runs. CONFIG - Business name: [name] - What I sell: [products or services] - Tools connected: [e.g. Stripe, Shopify, Google Workspace, HubSpot, QuickBooks] - My numbers that matter: [e.g. revenue, refund rate, new customers, cash on hand] - What a good week looks like: [e.g. $18k revenue, refunds under 3%, 40 new customers] - Who reads this: [just me / me and one other person] END CONFIG ## How to run it 1. Pull last week (Monday through Sunday) and the week before it from every connected tool. If a tool will not connect, say so plainly in a line at the bottom and carry on with what you have. Never guess a number. 2. For every number, show the value, the change versus the prior week, and the change versus the same week last month. Percentages alone hide small bases, so always show the raw number too. 3. Read the change, do not just report it. If revenue is flat but new customers are up 30%, say that average order value dropped and name the likely reason. 4. Look for the things I would not think to ask about: a refund spike, one product carrying the whole week, a customer who normally orders and did not, ad spend rising while sales stay flat, cash that will not cover payroll. 5. Check anything time-sensitive: invoices past due, subscriptions renewing, inventory that runs out inside three weeks. ## The output Give me exactly this, nothing extra. **Last week in one line.** One sentence. Was it good, flat or bad, and why. **The numbers.** A short table: metric, last week, prior week, change. Only the metrics in my CONFIG, plus anything you flagged as unusual. **What changed and why.** Three to five bullets. Each names a specific cause, not a restatement of the number. If you are not sure of the cause, say what you would check to find out. **Three decisions.** The three things worth my time this week, most valuable first. Each one gets: the decision, what happens if I do nothing, and the first step. Keep each under 40 words. **Watch list.** Anything that is not a problem yet but will be in two weeks. **What I could not see.** Any tool that failed, any number you had to leave out. Always include this section, even when it is empty. ## Rules - Never invent or estimate a number. A missing number goes in "What I could not see". - No encouragement, no summarising what I already read above. - If a number moved less than 5% and it is not unusual, leave it out of the analysis. - If the week was genuinely fine, say so in one line and keep the brief short. - Round money to whole dollars. Never use percentages without the raw number. - Ask before you write to any connected tool. Reading is fine, changing is not.

How to set it up. Fastest way. Copy it into Claude, fill in the CONFIG block, then say "run my Monday brief for last week." To keep it: download the file and add it as a Claude Skill under Settings, or drop it into a Project so it is there every Monday without pasting. Connect Stripe, Shopify or your bookkeeping first, or it will have nothing to read.