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A free guide by Mariah Brunner ↗ INSTAGRAM ↗ TIKTOK

Set Up Claude For
Your Business

Anthropic’s Small Business plugin turns Claude into an assistant that knows your books, sales and pipeline. Here’s the setup, your first business pulse and what to run next.

Claude for Small Business is a free plugin from Anthropic that works on every paid Claude plan. It now has 43 ready-made workflows for things like cash flow, payroll prep, chasing invoices, finding leads and marketing, plus 37 tool connections. (Anthropic’s announcement)

You don’t have to memorize any of it. You just tell Claude what you need, like "who owes me money?" or "can I make payroll?", and it picks the right workflow.

The Setup

01

Install the plugin

In Claude on the web or the desktop app, click Customize in the left sidebar, then Plugins, then Discover. Find Small Business and click Add. You can also install it from the plugin page. (Anthropic’s tutorial)

02

Type "get me started"

Claude walks you through a setup of about 15 minutes. It connects your first two tools, does one real task for you, learns about your business and even saves your brand colors so every report looks like you.

03

Connect the tools you use most

Start with two or three, not all of them. The list includes QuickBooks, Xero, PayPal, Stripe, Square, Shopify, HubSpot, Gusto, Canva, DocuSign, Gmail, Google Drive, Microsoft 365 and Slack. No connections yet? Every workflow also works from a spreadsheet, a PDF or text you paste in.

04

Ask for a business pulse

You get one page with your cash, your sales trend, your pipeline, this week’s calendar, anything urgent and the single most important thing to deal with today. If a number is missing, it says so instead of guessing.

Run My Pulse
Give me a business pulse. How is the business doing right now, and what's the one thing I should deal with today?

05

Know what it can’t do without you

Nothing sends, posts or pays without your approval. And your existing permissions carry over: if an employee can’t see something in QuickBooks or Drive today, they can’t see it through Claude either.

What To Run Next

Type / in the chat to see every workflow, or just describe what you need. These are my favorites to start with:

Make It Weekly
Run /monday-brief every Monday at 8am and send it to me. Set this up as a scheduled task.

Every workflow starts in approval mode. Once you trust one, you can let it run on its own and switch it back any time.

Before You Start
  1. Start low-stakes. Anthropic suggests a first task like "which invoices are overdue and which should I follow up on first?" Then check one customer against your books before approving anything.
  2. Check your privacy setting. Go to Settings, then Privacy, and decide whether to leave Help improve our AI models on. (How it works) Team and Enterprise plans don’t train on your data by default.
  3. More than one person on your team? Anthropic recommends a Team plan.

Want to learn the skills behind it? Anthropic and PayPal have a free course, AI Fluency for Small Businesses, with a certificate at the end.