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The plugin nobody talks about: a complete guide to Claude’s Small Business

Everyone talks about Skills. Everyone talks about Connectors. Almost nobody talks about Plugins, the thing that brings the two together.

A Plugin is a bundle: Skills, connections and commands, installed together in one click. Instead of hunting down and installing 40 Skills one by one, you install a whole team at once.

The Plugin I use most is Small Business, built by Anthropic. It takes on the less glamorous side of running a business: cash flow, invoices, payments, leads, follow-ups, content, hiring, contracts, and the start-of-week check: “OK, what’s going on in the business?”

You may have seen a graphic going around that says it has 31 Skills. That number is out of date. I went through Anthropic’s official repository, and today it has 44.

I went through every one of them, and ran a few on my own business to show you what they really produce. Let’s start.

01 · Behind the scenes

How do Plugins work?

Installing a Plugin doesn’t make Claude start doing things on its own. It simply gives Claude more tools, which it uses when your request calls for them. Every Plugin has three parts:

Skills

Instruction files that teach Claude to carry out specific tasks.

Connectors

The connections to the apps and systems the Skills work with.

Commands

Shortcuts. Type / and pick a command.

Claude picks the right Skill on its own. It keeps only a short description of each Skill in mind, not all of its instructions, so even 44 Skills don’t slow it down.

For example, ask “Who owes me money?” and the right Skill loads by itself. You can also skip the guesswork and type the command directly.

Most important

Nothing goes out without your approval.

The Skills prepare drafts and actions, but emails, payments, refunds and posts wait for you to approve them.

02 · Connectors

This is where it gets serious

If Skills are the brain, Connectors are the hands.

A Skill working alone can only use what you paste or upload. Once you connect your apps, that same Skill reads your real inbox, your calendar and your real business data, and works with all of them together. That’s the difference between:

Without Connectors

“Help me write a reminder for an unpaid invoice”

With Connectors

“Check who is late on payment, look at how each client usually pays, and prepare the right reminder message for each one.”

What can Small Business connect to?

Finance

QuickBooks, Xero, NetSuite, Zoho Books, MYOB, Stripe, PayPal, Square, Gusto, Ramp, Expensify

Sales and customers

HubSpot, Shopify, Apollo, DocuSign

Day-to-day work

Gmail, Microsoft 365, Google Calendar, Google Drive, Slack

Marketing

Canva, TikTok Ads, Wix

Everything else

Zapier. It opens up more than 9,000 more apps, and the Skill called /build-connector helps you set up the connection.

How do you connect?

You connect each app once, through Claude’s settings. Claude only reaches into an app when your request needs it. Connecting Gmail doesn’t mean it reads your inbox all day.

Connect only the tools you actually use. Two are enough to start.

And something many people miss: you don’t need a Connector to start at all. Every Skill also works with files, screenshots or text you paste in. Two of the three examples below didn’t use Connectors at all.

Tip

The first time I truly understood the power of this was with /monday-brief. I wrote one prompt:

“Start my week.”

Claude pulled my calendar and my emails into one page: what I have this week, what needs a reply and what I forgot. I didn’t open a single app.

03 · Installation

How do you install it?

  1. Open Claude and go to Customize, then Plugins.
  2. Search for Small Business.
  3. Click Install. All 44 Skills install together.

Then type “set me up”. The command runs /smb-onboard: it connects your first two apps, interviews you about the business and saves your answers, so every other Skill already knows who you are and what your business does.

04 · Building blocks and Recipes

Two kinds of Skills

This is one of the parts most people miss.

Building blocks

Each one does a single task, like a cash flow forecast or invoice follow-up.

Recipes

Workflows that chain several Skills and run them in the right order.

For example, /plan-payroll first runs a cash flow forecast, then checks who owes you money, and only then prepares payroll. That way you find out money is short before payday, not after.

05 · From the field

3 examples I ran myself

Example 1/brand-style
What I wrote

“Here’s my website. Make my reports and documents match my brand, and by default show the outputs as visual pages.”

I gave it a single link. It pulled the exact color palette, the logo and the fonts from the site, and created a sample report in that style so I could approve the design before it was saved. From then on, every report, audit and proposal comes out looking like it truly belongs to my brand.

Tip · Run this first. It takes about a minute, and it’s the difference between a document that looks AI-made and one you can send to a client.

Example 2/seo-ai-visibility

This is the Skill that made me realize I had work to do. I asked it to check my website and answer one question:

What I asked

When someone asks ChatGPT or Claude “what’s the best newsletter for learning AI tools for non-technical people?”, why don’t I show up, and what exactly do I need to fix?

No Connector needed. It simply read the site and searched the way an AI assistant would.

What did it find?

  1. My site was blocking ChatGPT’s and Claude’s crawlers.
  2. None of the “best AI newsletters” lists that AI assistants rely on mentioned me.
  3. Phrases like “non-technical” or “beginners” didn’t appear anywhere on my site.
  4. My About page still showed the business’s old name and spoke to my old audience.

It also showed me which sources ChatGPT and Claude rely on when they answer that question, and which newsletters do show up there.

What I liked most: it was clear about an important limit. You can’t force an AI to recommend you. What you can do is make sure AI assistants can read your site, understand who you serve and find you in the sources they already trust.

Tip · If you have a newsletter, an online store or a service business, this Skill is worth checking.

Example 3/proposal-builder

Here I gave it messy notes from a call with a sample client. They included the client’s name, the contact person, what the client wants, the launch date, the type of content, a price list and payment terms. And I asked:

What I wrote

“Turn these notes into a price quote and export it as a PDF too.”

What did I get? A branded proposal with a proposal number, an issue date, a validity period, the right price from the price list, and a paragraph explaining why the proposal fits the client. At the end I had a Word file and a PDF, ready to send.

Messy notes inReady-to-send proposal out

Tip · Give it your price list up front. If a price is missing, it flags it instead of inventing a number.

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