Claude for Small BusinessClaude for Small Business. What it does, and what it leaves to you.

What it is, in plain English

Most people use AI as a chat box: you paste something in, you copy the answer out. Claude for Small Business tries to close that gap. It connects Claude to the apps where your work already lives, so it can look things up and prepare work there, and it comes with a set of jobs that small business owners do every week, already written out step by step.

The links to your apps are called connectors. A connector lets Claude sign in to one app as you, read what your account can see and, if you allow it, make changes there, like drafting an invoice. The step-by-step jobs are what Anthropic calls workflows.

It runs in Claude Cowork, the part of Claude that works with your files and connected apps rather than just chatting. Since September 2026, Anthropic has been folding Cowork into the main Claude app in stages (Pro and Max plans first, Team later), so depending on your plan you may simply see it as Claude.

What's included

At launch in May 2026, Anthropic listed connections to QuickBooks, PayPal, HubSpot, Canva, Docusign, Google Workspace and Microsoft 365, plus 15 ready-made workflows across finance, operations, sales, marketing, HR and customer service. A September 2026 update raised that to 43 workflows and added more apps, including Shopify, Salesforce, Xero, Gusto, Square, Stripe and Zapier. As of October 2026, Anthropic's page lists 37 partner apps that the workflows can use.

Ready-made jobs

• Monday brief: one page with cash, sales, pipeline, calendar and the week's priorities.
• Close the month: checks your books against your payment apps and writes up a close packet for your accountant.
• Plan payroll: checks cash, lists overdue invoices and prepares the payroll run for you to submit.
• Bills, restocking and tax prep: gets bills, reorders and quarterly tax paperwork ready for review.
• Leads and sales: drafts replies to new enquiries, suggests who to call today and drafts outreach to prospects like your best customers.
• Marketing: reviews what's working, reads customer feedback and plans next week's content.

Setup and extras

• A guided setup: you ask Claude to "set me up" and it asks about your business and helps you connect your apps.
• A way to turn a task you repeat into your own named job, and to reach apps without a ready-made connector through Zapier.
• Free training: an online course, AI Fluency for Small Business, made with PayPal, and free half-day workshops in US cities through the Claude SMB Tour.

Most jobs also work without any connections: you can upload a spreadsheet, a PDF or a bank statement instead.

What it costs and which plan you need

There's no separate price for Claude for Small Business. Anthropic says it's available on every paid Claude plan and recommends Team for businesses with more than one person. As of October 2026, Anthropic's pricing page lists:

• Pro (one person): $20 a month billed monthly, or $17 a month billed yearly.
• Team (2 to 150 people): standard seats at $25 per person a month billed monthly, or $20 billed yearly. Premium seats with more usage cost $125, or $100 billed yearly.

Prices exclude tax and change often, so check the pricing page before you buy. You keep paying for your own apps too: the QuickBooks connection, for example, needs an active QuickBooks subscription.

The plan matters for more than price. Anthropic says it doesn't train its models on your business data by default on Team and Enterprise plans. Pro is a personal plan, where that depends on each person's privacy setting. Team also adds single sign-on and lets an owner control which apps people can connect.

What it does well

• It starts from real jobs. You pick "close the month" instead of staring at an empty chat box and wondering what to type.
• It keeps the permissions you already have. If someone can't see a report in QuickBooks or a folder in Google Drive, they can't see it through Claude either.
• It asks first. Every workflow starts in approval mode: Claude prepares the work and waits for your OK before anything sends, posts or pays. Some jobs stop short on purpose. Payroll is staged in Gusto for you to submit.
• It's cheap to try. You can pay month to month, connect one app at a time and disconnect any of them in settings.

What it leaves to you

The ready-made jobs are written for a typical small business. Yours isn't typical to you. These are the parts no off-the-shelf kit can fill in.

Your definitions

What counts as "late" for an invoice? Which accounts are cash? What makes a lead worth calling back today? Claude will use sensible general answers unless you give it yours, and a confident report built on the wrong definition is worse than no report.

Who can see what

Claude follows each app's permissions, which is good, but it means loose permissions stay loose. If everyone logs in to QuickBooks as the owner, everyone's Claude can see the owner's numbers. Decide who should see payroll, margins and customer details before you connect anything, and fix the logins first.

What needs approval

Approval mode is the default, but each workflow can be switched to run without asking. Decide as a business, not person by person, which jobs must always wait for a named person: refunds, payments, anything that goes to a customer. On Team, an owner can set each connected app's actions to always allowed, needs approval or blocked for everyone.

Your policies, written down

Claude can only follow rules it can read. Your refund policy, payment terms, price list and the way you talk to customers need to exist as a short document, not in someone's head.

Training your team

The free course covers AI in general. Your team still needs an hour on your jobs, your apps and your rules: what to ask, what to check and what never to paste in.

Keeping it working

Apps change, connections drop and need reconnecting, people join and leave, and your policies move on. Someone has to own that, or the setup quietly drifts out of date.

How to start on your own

1. Pick one job that eats time every week, like the Monday brief or chasing unpaid invoices. One job, not five.
2. Choose the plan. Pro if it's just you. Team as soon as a second person will use it, so the company owns the accounts and training on your data is off by default.
3. Install and set up. Get the Claude desktop app for Mac or Windows, add Claude for Small Business from Anthropic's page, then ask Claude to "set me up".
4. Connect one app, signed in as yourself, and read the access it asks for before you agree.
5. Leave approvals on and run the job for two weeks. Check each result against the app it came from.
6. Write down what you corrected: your definitions, your rules and anything it got wrong. Give that document to Claude so it uses your answers next time.
7. Then add a second job or a second person, not both at once.

On your own or set up for you

Plenty of small businesses can do this themselves. If it's one to five people, your apps are on Anthropic's list and one person has a few hours a week to own it, start on your own. Help is worth paying for when several people need different access, your rules live in people's heads, your apps aren't on the list, or you'd rather spend those hours on the business.

That second column is what we do. We work with Claude and the other major assistants, and we start with a free 30-minute call to find the jobs worth doing first. You get a plain-English plan of what your assistant will do, who can ask for what and what always needs a person, with a fixed price in writing. Nothing is built until you sign it. If you'd rather do it yourself, you keep the shortlist.

Common questions

Does Claude connect to QuickBooks?

Yes. Intuit makes a QuickBooks connector for Claude, available to US customers with QuickBooks Online and some other Intuit plans as of October 2026. It can read reports like profit and loss and cash flow, create and send invoices and estimates, make payment links and add customers. Intuit says it asks for your confirmation before deleting anything, but new invoices appear in QuickBooks straight away, so check each one.

Is Claude for Small Business free?

It has no price of its own, but it needs a paid Claude plan, and you still pay for the apps you connect. The training course and workshops are free.

Do I need the Team plan?

No, it works on Pro. But Anthropic recommends Team for more than one person, and Team is where your business data is kept out of model training by default and an owner controls the accounts.

Can it send emails or pay bills by itself?

Not by default. Anthropic says Claude does the work and waits for your approval before anything sends, posts or pays. Any workflow can be switched to run without asking, so agree as a team which ones never should.