Anthropic's Small Business plugin ships free with a Claude Team plan and does something most AI tools don't: it arrives with the workflows already built. Not a blank chat window and a prompt library you have to write yourself. Five ready-made jobs, tuned to the parts of running a small business that eat the most time and require the least judgment.
Across all Canadian businesses, AI use doubled in a single year, from 6.1% to 12.2% (Statistics Canada, 2025). Most of that growth sits inside companies large enough to have someone whose job is figuring out which tools to buy and how to wire them together. A five-person landscaping company or a twelve-person accounting firm rarely has that person. The Small Business plugin is built for the business that doesn't, which is most of Atlantic Canada.
The five workflows, and what each one replaces
Monday Brief
Every Monday, someone in a small business pulls together cash position, this week's sales, what's stuck in the pipeline, and which invoices are overdue, usually from three or four different logins. Monday Brief does that pull automatically, from your accounting software and your CRM, and puts it on one page before the owner's first coffee.
Speed to Lead
A lead that comes in at 9 p.m. on a Saturday and doesn't get a reply until Monday morning is a lead most businesses lose. Speed to Lead reads the inquiry, asks the qualifying questions a person would ask, logs it in the CRM, and replies the same night. The business still closes the sale; the plugin just keeps it from going cold first.
Proposal Builder
A contractor who dictates a voice memo from the truck after a site visit gets back a priced, branded proposal instead of an hour at the keyboard that evening. The pricing logic and the branding both come from what you tell it about your business up front; it does not invent numbers.
Close the Month
Reconciling accounts and pulling together a close packet for the accountant is mechanical until it isn't. The plugin does the mechanical part and flags the transactions that look unusual for a person to look at, rather than guessing at them.
Marketing Monday
Drafts of next week's social posts and replies to recent reviews, ready for someone to read and approve before anything goes out. It writes in the voice you give it. It does not publish anything on its own.
The rule that makes it worth turning on
Every one of these workflows runs in what Anthropic calls approval mode: Claude drafts and stages, and a person approves before anything sends, posts, or pays. That isn't a limitation bolted on for show. It's the reason a small business can hand a plugin access to its bank feed and its CRM without handing over judgment along with it. The plugin is fast. The approval step is where the business still makes the actual decision.
What it needs before it works
- A Claude Team plan, two seats minimum, bought directly from Anthropic.
- The Claude desktop app installed on the machines that will run it. Mac or Windows.
- The tools you already use. Claude connects to more than three dozen of them, including QuickBooks, Xero, HubSpot, Shopify, Square, Stripe, Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, Slack and Zoho; a tool that isn't on the list can usually still feed in through a spreadsheet upload.
- No tokens. No API keys. Nothing beyond the seats is billed by usage.
Where it stops helping
The plugin is generic. It ships knowing how a small business runs in general, not how yours runs specifically: which numbers the owner actually watches, who is allowed to approve what, which client always needs the invoice worded a certain way. Someone still has to teach it that, and that someone is usually not the owner's first free afternoon. Anthropic's own onboarding gets a business most of the way there. The last stretch (the org-specific rules, the connector for a less common tool, training the staff who will actually use it) is exactly the part a lot of businesses either skip or spend a weekend fighting with alone.
How to start
If you have an afternoon and a comfort with software settings, Anthropic's own setup walkthrough will get the plugin running and the default workflows live within a couple of hours. If you would rather have someone provision the seats, tune the workflows to your actual tools, and train your staff in a single session, that is the entire scope of our Claude for Your Business package.