Claude for Small Business

> PayPal powers settlements, invoicing, disputes, and refunds inside Claude.

> Intuit QuickBooks handles payroll planning, the monthly close, and cash-flow, along with tools to help businesses prepare for tax season, and reconciliation work that touches every other system.

I can't wait for the horror stories, this is going to be fun. Remember last month when Anthropic was like: no, we're not going to refund you even though we admit we're in the wrong for anti-competitively burning credits? These are some of the last things I would trust an LLM with in a small business and on top of it Anthropic has shitty customer support. I will actively be telling prospects to avoid.

There is going to be so many horror stories that will come from this, ie. Claude overpaid/underpaid my employees, Claude hallucinated the tax code and now the IRS is seizing my assets. etc…

Murphy’s Law is undefeated. Add in a psycophantic hallucination black box to critical business data and you have a recipe for hilarity.

Normies cannot be trusted to hand off these functions to an LLM because they are mostly incapable of verifying the outputs. Worse yet - these tools are actually idiocratizing the masses to the point they don’t even think they need to.

And of course Anthropic will never have any liability for marketing and selling tools that are unfit for purpose.

I'm increasingly convinced that there's a killer app waiting for whoever can come up with a UI that makes claude code or codex accessible to the average user.

Onboarding my non-software engineer teammates to it has super-charged them and essentially given them all their own personal developer that can automate tasks for them. Managing codebases, etc. is still a hassle though.

90% of the power of Excel was that it was functionally a database that a normal person could actually use. I think we'll see something similar with coding agents.

By coincidence, I've looked yesterday a small documentary [1] about the people tagging all those invoices to train theses models. For 120 €/month they are reading about 1000 to 4000 invoices per day and check and tag them for AI training.

[1] https://www.arte.tv/en/videos/126831-000-A/arte-reportage/

You are absolutely right. I shouldn’t have paid that invoice from ScamInc. Would you like me to help you file for bankruptcy?

I understand why this is a good idea. I have Claude Code hooked up to my mail synced via IMAP, my Mercury read-only token, and beancount, and it gets almost all of my invoices and categorizes them. The tedious portion for a lot of this is:

* find invoice I_E for expense E

* associate and categorize E based on I_E and transaction field

These things are annoying but Claude Code is great at it and it leaves a much smaller set I have to manually resolve. This is a class of problems that are tractable and checkable, which I happily use LLMs on. If it miscategorizes it, I'm going to see it because I'm looking over the accounts. In fact, I was previously using a different accounting app which had poor API support, so I dumped it so I could use Claude and it's incredible how much this helps me.

There is an enormous number of use-cases that Claude/GPT are good for and the hard part is market penetration here. As an example, my dad was looking at some statistical health survey data in India and working out what things you could glean from it. Claude identified the things that would complicate his analysis in no time. He's 70 years old, and he'd done it all manually until he asked me (I've got a Mathematics degree) if something made statistical sense to do. I told him what it likely was and then asked him to try Claude. Knocked out his work and mine in moments. But he didn't think to use it. Now I have to get him a ChatGPT/Claude subscription.

It's like how if you go to the Datadog pricing page they don't list a feature set. They have all these use-case lists with prices. You can build things using their base metrics functionality and logs functionality but showing the use-cases must have more adoption.

I know I always dreamed of running my own business that someone could turn off with a simple switch flip at the drop of a hat whenever they decided. Serfdom and sharecropping is grand. /Sarcasm

So businesses don’t mind sharing ALL their internal documents, plans, code, designs with Anthropic? Or did that ship already sail?

I know that Google, Atlassian, Microsoft et al have been having access to our emails and online docs for a while… it just strikes me as naive to now sharing everything by default to a single company just like that. They are not just training on internal business data, I would imagine they also have plans to monetise it somehow

> Claude helps take the late-night work off their plates.

This is dangerous. Relying on so much of your business on a third party. We've seen this many times before where businesses get destroyed because something gets broken somewhere that they have outsourced and have no control over.

In my view this service should not be used, unless there is a local llm or clear manual alternative.

Then the question begs - Why use Claude at all?

Maybe a proof of concept only while you come up with a real solution. Maybe to use claude to get rid of Claude

The people who get dazzled by bright lights are going to be the ones licking their wounds later. There is going to be eggs on faces one day.

Let me get this straight: a few times per month, someone posts horror stories about how Claude led to losing data and money.

Anthropic's response: let's make a nice package out of this, and let's target specifically the businesses that are less likely to be ready to manage such horrible events.

I run a s business (small if you compare it to tech companies).

I can tell you the drag is between your own tools and the real world (which is very messy and inconsistent): taxes, compliance, payroll, amendments, share structures, etc.

Within my island, my books are in order, invoices and time keeping is fully automated, calendars and sales pipelines are connected.

I'm sure there are many businesses whose inner islands are not as orderly. The zillion tools out there all try to bring equanimity to the chaos and yet here we still are with fresh books, quickbooks, and xero...

Waiting to hear the stories of things Claude did running amok in Quickbooks.

You've got to believe that they're doing this based on market research via the prompts people are entering, both as small businesses and possibly side project hackers not on plans without appropriate IP protection.

My point being, they know they need to make a viable business, and they've clearly seen demand. Meaning there are already a lot of small businesses trying to use Claude to do these things.

Given what they have I wouldn't be surprised if they setup a pipeline of niche toolsets that they can spin up in response to mass user prompting.

Not a pretty future for SaaS and side hustles.

Is there a way to find "the concerns" of people from back when MS Excel was becoming a thing? Maybe someone here can share how people took the introduction of the early days "productivity tools" like MS Word and MS Excel?

My initial take is bad idea because those people don't have the kind of security hygiene instincts that make CC a sane choice for coders.

> As part of our public benefit mission, we are committed to helping business owners harness AI more fully and effectively for their most important work.

That's rich. What public benefit mission? The benefit of extracting money from the public?

FYI, the definition of small business in the US is fewer than 500 employees.

It'd be nice if we could get a callback from the sales people at Anthropic... We want to give you money!

Claude code is good, Opus as general model is a hot hallucinating piece of garbage. I asked it to review a single page 50 rows, 2 column excel file. It hallucinated almost everything in the file. It repeated that for the next two files I asked it to review, these were tiny files, barely 20 kb.

The funny part is Opus was the one which generated the files in the first place. This was Opus 4.7 High. So no thank you, Anthropic.

Anthropic keeps getting better

I’ve noticed that the emphasis in messaging and product from Anthropic is towards monolithic agent usage rather than building systems using agents or building more specialised agents. I listened to a talk by Boris recently and his vision for the future was that “the model just knows”.

My guess is that they are trying to increase the cost of switching as much as they possibly can before the VC subsidies run out and they have to 10x their prices.

I think I have Claude fatigue.

Was hoping for an on-premises solution. Sending your data and your clients' data to a cloud is unacceptable for many small businesses.

Does it help track me all the expenses from email and make them Booker ready or accountant ready. Worst paperwork job ever.

Kinda weird to assume that a "small" business would have $16.9m cash on hand...

As someone working in a small business/startup, who finally got the team Claude Team Premium, I don't really get what might I benefit extra from by enabling this. I can find whatever workflows and tell it to integrate them anyway, why would I bother with this?

Wow, this is very close to an app I’m building. My take is that the key part is not just generating the workflow, but making it reviewable and deterministic enough that businesses can actually trust it.

To me this looks like a cool demo product. Yet, the problem it's solving could be equally solved by a well integrated all-in-one business suite.

I don't run a small business myself, but I assume the scope of administrative tasks in such company is well defined and understood.

While Claude AI itself is quite good, their support is just terrible - when support AI cannot provide a solution to a problem, it is absolutely not willing to escalate to human engineers. What a shame.

10 years working with SMB. They don't use it now because complexity and cost. While the majority of users here seem to be interested in offloading their bank account to AI for "productivity" or whatever, most SMBs die in 1-3 years and struggle through with chump-change.

If you want to help SMB, stop with the interconnectivity hype of bringing outrageously expensive software together. Try making something that really helps instead of syphens more money and hurts the workforce. Seriously, what's Claude going to do for a landscaper using pen-and-paper anyway? That's the majority of your SMB. The grifting MSPs are your target for this bs.

Anthropic vs OAI fierce competition, maybe, the most intense we have seen in capitalism history. They can’t let breathe each other. One declare free Codex for businesses to adopt, and a set of agents. Another instantly rolling out new products in the same niche. Heck, they even start to release their models in the same day. We just in middle May and it is already which product release from each of them?

In books of the future, if we ever hold one, I think this will be studied a lot. We have seen before competitions and rivals, but they mostly were rivalry of craft. Here it is a rivalry of velocity and reach. Who can first target user with whatever they have ready to offer.

classic solution looking for a problem.

I know they are trying to get their product to fit-in & justify the massive valuations.

but this ain't it - just like the other Claude for ** -- the market doesn't exist.

if they spoke to small businesses they would know their problems are either around marketing or data.

Looks promising, but not sure how exactly will help the small businesses. The current app/software stores are flooded with new vibe-coded stuff hence it seems ppl already handling using different dev tools for releasing new apps.

That's interesting. I've been trying to build something similar as a side project: Hermes agent + plugins (MCP, skills, and agents) + a Postgres DB for auditing and state. The idea is essentially to make all of that a black box and present a simple “work queue” to a desk assistant.

Good validation that this is indeed a space the frontier firms are thinking about along similar lines.

"From these tools, it can plan payroll, close the month, run a sales campaign, chase invoices, and more." wow

Im both excited and afraid for the future lol

"Closing the month with fewer errors."

Inspiring quote there.

We used to wire tools together with APIs and webhooks. Now the interesting bit is Claude sitting in the middle with MCP, keeping context while moving between them.

but small businesses are gonna ask the same 4 things: how much, how reliable, how easy to manage, and does it actually save anyone time?

If I heard my employer was using Claude to manage payroll, I’d be looking for a new job - quickly.

Isn’t Cowork a tough thing to trust? What if it goes wrong, especially in the hands of users that aren’t programmers? Anthropic is releasing these vibe codes products continuously and I feel like it’s only a matter of time before something goes wrong. Shouldn’t they focus on safety and security first before releasing these?

What's new here? It looks good - accessing connectors using Claude but not sure whether there's something fundamentally novel

Remember the old 'Facebook for X',

Turns out Anthropic is pivoting so fast that they're doing all the 'Claude for X' themselves.

Surely 'Claude for Cheese' is soon.

Good initiative even if it's aimed at the US for now.

Our company supports small teams in Germany with the use of agentic AI. We're guinea pigging this on ourselves. There is a lot of friction taking AI into use right now for people who aren't developers. Most tools are aimed at developers and are useless without a lot of complicated hoops that you need to jump through to connect stuff, deal with permissions, etc.

I'm seeing a wider issue that OpenAI and Anthropic seem to just have a few blindspots when it comes to dealing with UX topics and product management. Anthropic seems a bit ahead but not much on supporting business users. But not by a lot.

I'm more familiar with the OpenAI side. I'm a developer, so I can work around it. But I've been onboarding our non developer CEO and friend to codex so he can actually get shit done and it's not been pretty. He's constantly fighting with trying to wrap his head around repositories, git, having to edit small text files, etc.

Despite all this, it's hugely empowering for him to be using codex. I got him working on our website directly (content and design), he has managed to get his inbox hooked up and our google drive. He's working on presentations, sales offers, CRM topics, accounting topics, and more. Not your typical programmer centric topics (aside from the website). It's OK, he's smart enough. But I'd hate to go through this with junior business interns.

The key challenge I see is company level guardrails and skills and permission hell. I got our CEO on codex because in ChatGPT can't use tools or skills. And you need both to get productive. So Codex is the only option right now (in OpenAI). Claude Cowork and Claude for Small Businesses is a good move.

Skills are where you can express organization specific rules, processes, etc. Simple things like when dealing with gmail, don't send emails and only create drafts. Because we want people approving the final email that gets send, always. We have a growing number of those that are specific to our company and tools.

Another challenge I see is dealing with team collaboration tools and AI. We currently have these weird 1 on 1 tools where you have session with an agent to do stuff. But collaborating with more people requires proper team chat tools. That does not exist currently. I have some internal experimental setup involving Matrix, OpenClaw, and some skills that actually is super useful for this. But I would not recommend that for obvious security reasons.

Another challenge is that most things you'd want to connect seem to be completely unprepared for this. This is an industry wide problem that seems to affect most SAAS products with very few exceptions. Existing data silos are going to be connected to AI tools and this is going to escalate fast. So far, there's a lot of mumbling about APIs, cli tools, and not much else. However, most of these products are completely unprepared for an influx of business users wanting to do productive stuff with these tools and AI. There is going to be a lot of friction there and I think a few SAAS companies seem incapable at this point of adjusting their roadmaps and fighting their reflex to deny access to absolutely everything and protect their walled gardens. I think it's going to be a blood bath in that market with customers and users jumping ship to more AI ready alternatives.

We're only four years in to this revolution but especially with Google their level of preparedness with Google Workspace for this is shockingly poor. Gmail access is essentially all or nothing currently. That's going to cause issues. I don't think MS is much further in their thinking. And these two are some of the more clued in companies in the AI space given that they funded and invented most of it.

Would love to see something other than PayPal. PayPal is known to be rather abusive to small business. Not sure why Claude would partner with them.

This feels like the natural evolution of productivity software: fewer dashboards, more context-aware workflows.

I had a trust issue up to opus 4.6

Now I have claude hooked up to a dozen projects I used to maintain manually. It is such a pleasure watch it read the complaint and go to town on small problems without dropping any databases or removing home dirs.

Sherlocking continues until morale improves.

>Planning payroll with confidence. Settle your QuickBooks cash position against incoming PayPal settlements, build a 30-day forecast, rank what's overdue, and queue the reminders for you to approve and send.

Am I too close to AI that this sounds fucking crazy to me? In no world would I give Claude or any AI agent direct write access to financial operations like payouts/settlements.

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So is Anthropic and co finally admitting they need to make products (and money) and done with the “AGI is tomorrow bro just give us a few more trillion bro”?

Security concerns make it hard to fully trust these tools, but in practice many teams still end up needing to use them.