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Guide Updated September 2026

The Back Office You Never Hired

Claude's free Small Business plugin gives you 30+ ready-to-run commands for chasing invoices, reading contracts, and closing the month. Install it in about a minute.

Before we get into it

The money part of a solo business is not hard. It is just relentless.

Somebody owes you $800 and you have not chased it because writing that email feels awkward. Your books are three weeks behind. There is a contract sitting in your inbox that you skimmed, signed, and quietly hoped was fine. A lead came in on Tuesday and you still have not replied.

None of that is difficult work. It is the work that has no deadline, so it never gets done, and it costs you real money every single month.

A real company hands this to a bookkeeper and an ops person. You hand it to future you, who is also busy.

Anthropic recently packaged this exact pile of work into one free plugin for Claude. Thirty-plus commands that chase the invoice, read the contract, rank the leads, and close the month. Not prompts you have to write. Commands you type.

The work that has no deadline is the work that quietly costs you the most. This is the first tool I have used that just does it.

What a plugin actually is

A plugin is a pre-built bundle of Claude abilities. Instead of writing a careful prompt every time you need the same job done, you type one command and the whole workflow runs.

The Small Business plugin lives in Cowork, Claude's workspace for longer projects, and it plugs into tools you probably already pay for: QuickBooks, Stripe, PayPal, Square, HubSpot, Gmail, Google Calendar, DocuSign.

What it costs: the plugin itself is free. Every command is included the moment you install it. Plugins do require a paid Claude plan, so if you are on the free tier this is the thing that finally justifies upgrading. Compare it to what a part-time bookkeeper charges for one month and the math gets obvious fast.

1. Install it in about a minute

Four steps, and none of them involve code.

  1. Open the Cowork tab in Claude, on desktop or at claude.ai
  2. Go to Customize, then the Plugins tab
  3. Click Browse plugins, search "Small Business", hit Install
  4. Start a new chat, type / or click +, then search "small business" to see everything it can do

Then run /smb-onboard first. That command is the plugin teaching itself your business. It walks you through connecting your first tools and asks about how you work, and every other command gets sharper because of what it learns there.

2. Connect the tools you already use

The commands are only as good as what they can see. Connect what is relevant and skip the rest.

You connect these under Customize → Connectors, and each one asks you to log in to that platform.

Start with two: whatever you use for accounting, plus whatever takes your money. That pair alone switches on every financial command, which is where the return is.

3. The commands worth knowing

There are more than thirty. Do not memorize them. Typing / shows the full menu with a description of each. These are the ones that matter most when you are the entire company.

Getting paid

Landing work

Keeping clients

Selling more

The weekly rhythm

Paperwork

4. What it looks like in practice

Type this:

/invoice-chase

Here is what happens next:

  1. Claude pulls every unpaid invoice from QuickBooks and your payment tool, oldest first
  2. It looks at how each client has paid you before, and picks the tone to match. A client who is always three days late gets a nudge. A client who is sixty days out gets something firmer
  3. It writes a follow-up for each one, personalized
  4. It stages them and waits for you

That last step is the important one. The plugin drafts, organizes, and stages. Anything that touches money or reaches a client waits for you to approve it. It is not sending emails on your behalf while you sleep.

The habit worth building: run /monday-brief, then /invoice-chase, first thing Monday. Ten minutes with a coffee and the two worst jobs of your week are finished before you have opened anything else.

5. Your first week

Add one command a day. Twelve commands installed on a Monday is twelve commands you have forgotten by Wednesday.

When something breaks

Nine times out of ten a command fails because a connector is missing, and it will tell you exactly which tool it could not reach. Go to Customize → Connectors, connect it, run the command again.

Where this fits for a solo business

Be honest about which half of this you will use.

If you sell to clients, invoice people, or handle contracts, the money commands are the whole reason to install this. /invoice-chase alone can pay for your Claude subscription in one Monday.

If you sell digital products or run on ad and creator income, some of this will not apply. No HubSpot pipeline, no payroll to plan. The commands still worth your time are /close-month, /tax-prep, /cash-flow-snapshot, /price-check, and /review-contract for the brand deals.

Either way, this is the part of the business that has been running on your memory and your good intentions. Now it runs on a command.

Your next step

Do the small version today.

  1. Install the plugin and run /smb-onboard
  2. Connect your accounting tool and whatever takes your money
  3. Run /invoice-chase and read what it drafted before you approve anything
  4. Look at the total sitting in unpaid invoices

That last number is the one that gets people moving. It is usually larger than they expected, and it has been sitting there the whole time.

You are still a one-person business. You just stopped being your own worst bookkeeper.

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