Hi there,
Welcome to Your Money, Your AI issue four. Whether you've been here since the first issue or joined this week, I'm glad you are reading.
The last issues were about money and bias. This one is more hands-on. It's about the tool I switched on this week, and what happened when I let it into my admin.
Pour a coffee ☕️. This one is worth saving.
Sooooo…
I have sat on investment committees that approved millions in capital (very exciting sometimes, I have to say - but cannot recommend if you have anxieties or are touchy-feely). This Monday I spent forty minutes looking for an invoice I'd sent to a client in March.
Forty minutes. I found it in a folder called "docs 2" 😵💫
This is the part of running a business nobody tell you about. I run three:
my consulting practice,
my board and advisory work,
and this newsletter.
Apart from it, I have quite some investments, that require admin too.
I have a small team supporting me, but they work project by project, remotely, from different places. So we all need one shared virtual workplace, and the admin that holds it together still lands on my desk.
So this week I switched on Claude for Small Business plugin across all three.
In this edition:
What Claude for SMB is, and what plugins and skills actually are
Whether your data is safe
How to set it up in 15 minutes
What I use it for, and what surprised me
Nobody paid for this edition. There are no affiliate links. Ony my personal opinion.
What it is, in one paragraph
Anthropic describes Claude for SMB as a package of connectors and ready-to-run workflows that put Claude inside the tools small businesses already use, including QuickBooks, PayPal, HubSpot, Canva, Docusign, Google Workspace and Microsoft 365.
It launched in May.
Last week Anthropic expanded it with 43 new workflows and connections to 37 partners, adding tools like Shopify, Salesforce and TikTok Ads, and extending it from bookkeeping into lead follow-up and marketing. And this is what got me interested! 👆
The part I cared about most: every task is started by you, and you approve the plan first, or let it run end-to-end once you're ready. Nothing sends, posts or pays without a yes from me.
Plugins and skills, in plain words
A quick refresher on those two words - as Anna sent me a question about it after issue #1.
A skill is a set of instructions for one specific job. For instance, invoice-chase knows how to find overdue invoices and draft reminders. contract-review knows how to read an agreement and flag the risky terms. Once a skill is there, you don't explain the job every time. A few words are enough.
A plugin is a bundle of skills. Installing it adds all of them at once. That's why, after one click, you have the whole set: close-month, month-end-prep, cash-flow-snapshot, invoice-chase and the rest.
Small Business is one plugin. There are others, like Finance, Marketing, Design and Data, and each brings its own set of skills.
Then there's a third kind: personal skills. These are the ones you build for how you work.
An example below is from 2 of mine: eugenia-voice holds how I write, so drafts sound like me. board-advisory-practice holds how I manage board roles, so I stop re-explaining my own criteria.
What about my data?
This is the first question I'd ask as an investor, so it's the first one I asked here.
Anthropic doesn't train Claude on your business data - and the permissions you've already set in your tools still apply. If an employee can't see something in your CRM today, they can't see it through Claude. The full policy is in the Trust Center.
Read it yourself. That's diligence, and it takes ten minutes.
Getting set up (15 minutes)
You need the Claude desktop app on a paid plan: Pro, Max, Team or Enterprise. Claude free plan and the browser version - sadly - won't do it.
Install the plugin. Open the desktop app and click Customize in the left sidebar. Under Plugins, click +, find Small Business, and click Install.
Let it interview you. Type "set me up." This runs
smb-onboard, the setup skill. Claude asks what you do, who you work with, and what's hardest right now. It helps you connect your first tools and saves that context, so every skill after this already knows your business.
Answer honestly. "I'm a freelance designer, no staff, invoices are a mess" definitely gets you further than a polished sales pitch 😊Connect only what you need. Every connection asks you to sign in to that tool and approve access. Start with email and calendar. Add accounting or payments later, once you trust what it does with the first two.
Tell it to drop what you don't use. The defaults assume a business with staff, a CRM and a payroll. Type "customize the Small Business plugin for my business" and say plainly: no employees, no CRM, no inventory. It rewrites the defaults to match.
Run one task and check it against something you know. If it drafts invoice reminders, pick one client you know offhand and make sure the details match your records before anything goes out. Do that with every new skill until you trust it.
You don't have to memorise skill names. Type the job in plain words and Claude picks the right skill. To see the full menu, type / in the chat bar.
What you can plug in
Mail, calendar and files: Gmail or Microsoft 365, plus Slack
Accounting: MYOB, NetSuite, QuickBooks, Xero, Zoho Books
Payments: PayPal, Square, Stripe
Online store: Shopify, Square
CRM: HubSpot, Salesforce
E-signature, payroll and spend: DocuSign, Gusto, Ramp
Design and workspace: Canva, Notion, Trello
Anything else: type "connect my [tool]" and
build-connectorwill try to link it, through Zapier if needed
A good start are four: Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Drive and Slack. That's enough to run most of what follows.
The setup connects them one at a time, and several skills run on files you upload.
The belief worth changing
Most of us still treat AI as a very clever search box. We ask it a question, we copy the answer, we paste it somewhere else, and we do the actual work ourselves.
That's the MOST expensive way to use it.
The value for a small business sits in the work between your tools.
The email that should have become an invoice reminder, the call notes that should have become a proposal, the contract clause you skimmed at 11pm. That work is invisible and unpaid, and it compounds.
Your time is capital. And you are losing it doing admin work.
How I'm using it across my three businesses
Money: "forecast my cash flow" (
cash-flow-snapshot) is the one I use most. More on why in the proof below.Consulting: "write a proposal for [client]" (
proposal-builder) turns my discovery-call notes into a scoped, priced first draft. "who owes me money" (invoice-chase) drafts reminders for late invoices, gentle for good payers and firmer for repeat offenders.Board and advisory work: "what am I signing" (
contract-review) gives me a first pass on advisory agreements and returns a marked-up doc with the risky terms flagged. It's a reader, not my lawyer. My personalboard-advisory-practiceskill then checks the terms against my own criteria.This newsletter: (
social-content-engine) turns each edition into a content plan and draft posts, with Claude or Canva designs we then fix by hand.eugenia-voicemakes the drafts sound like me. "how do I show up in AI search" (seo-ai-visibility) checks whether assistants can find yourmoney-yourai.com.The team: Slack and Google Drive are connected, so briefs, drafts and files land where my remote team already works. Nobody has to ask "where's the latest version?"
All of it: "how's the business doing" (
business-pulse) gives me a one-page Monday snapshot of cash, pipeline, calendar and urgent emails.
★ As promised, for freelancers and solo operators: here we go!
Skip the payroll, hiring and the rest of the pain. Start here, from the lowest risk to the highest:
Then build your personal skills. When one of these becomes a weekly habit, or you catch yourself explaining the same thing to Claude twice, type "I do this every week, automate it." build-agent turns that task into a skill of your own, named, saved and run the same way every time. That's how the general toolkit becomes yours.
Worth a look once you are settled:
"find me clients like my best ones" →
grow-pipeline. Builds a prospect list and writes outreach in your voice."reconnect with old clients" →
reactivate. Finds past contacts worth getting back in touch with. For a freelancer, this is usually the cheapest new work there is."forecast my cash flow" →
cash-flow-snapshot. A 30/60/90-day outlook with risk flags, in an Excel file. Useful if your income is lumpy."get my tax stuff together" →
tax-prep. Gathers receipts and documents for your accountant.
The proof
The winner for me was the cash flow forecast. Honestly - I didn't expect that.
My revenue streams can be unpredictable. Board fees, consulting projects, return on investments all pay on different schedules. My team gets paid project by project. For years I've planned those payouts on instinct and a spreadsheet I didn't trust.
cash-flow-snapshot looked at when my revenue actually arrives, not when the invoice says it should. It also looked at when it will arrive, based on the contracts I'm signing now. Then it flagged the tight weeks.
I now schedule team payouts around real cash, and I can see a gap two months out instead of two days out.
What didn't work as planned: some skills are clearly written for the US.
tax-prep works with US federal tax, quarterly estimated payments and 1099 contractor forms, none of which apply to me.
I had to tell it which countries I operate in and what my accountant actually needs, and it adjusted. cash-flow-snapshot also assumed a single currency, while my money moves in more than one. One sentence fixed it, and it now forecasts in each currency before converting.
If you're in Europe, expect to do the same. Tell each skill where you live and work the first time you use it. It remembers the correction.
And for scale: Claude for SMB has been installed more than 993,000 times since May. Maybe now that you know how easy it is, that’s your sign to join almost 1 million people using it? 😉
15 minutes. By the end, it knows your business, and your next ask is already personal.
Test it yourself and tell me which of the six sentences you tried first. I read everything, including the replies that say it didn't work.
With love and dedication to make women’s life easier,
Eugenia
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