Claude for Small Business

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.

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.

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/

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.

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...

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

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

I think I have Claude fatigue.

"Closing the month with fewer errors."

Inspiring quote there.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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”?

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.

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?

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.

>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.