Best Claude Skills for Business: 15 to Build (or Install) in 2026

When Anthropic launched Claude for Small Business in May 2026, they shipped a bundle of fifteen pre-built Skills covering finance, sales, marketing, HR, operations, and customer service. The list is a strong signal of what Anthropic believes most small businesses actually need. After building Skills for our consulting clients over the past six months, our shortlist overlaps with theirs by about half — and diverges in important ways.

This post is the practical version of that list. Fifteen Skills, grouped by department, with example SKILL.md snippets for the highest-ROI ones, a note on which come free in the Small Business plugin, and which you need to build yourself for your specific business.

If you have not read our Skills guide, it covers the mechanics of writing a SKILL.md from scratch. This post assumes you know the format and want to know which Skills to write first.

The pattern: how to pick which Skills to build

Before the list, the heuristic that saves you weeks of false starts.

A Skill is worth building when the same kind of writing or analysis happens at least weekly, the rules are non-obvious to a new hire, and the cost of inconsistency is real. That is the trifecta. Any task that fails one of those three usually does not justify a Skill — a one-off prompt is enough.

The Skills below all pass the trifecta for a typical 5–50 person business. Where the Small Business plugin already ships a Skill that does the job, we say so. Where you need to build it yourself, we show the description and structure.

Finance and operations (the highest-ROI category)

This is where most SMBs see the fastest payback. Money flowing in and out is the most measurable, most repeatable surface in any business.

1. Invoice chaser

Ships in the SMB plugin.

Pulls overdue invoices from QuickBooks, drafts follow-up emails in escalating tones (gentle reminder → firm → final notice), schedules send times based on customer patterns. Most SMBs recover 2–4% of revenue that was previously written off.

Why custom-build it instead: if your follow-up tone is highly specific (long-standing customers get different handling than one-offs), build a customisation Skill that overrides the default.

2. Monthly close

Ships in the SMB plugin.

Reconciles QuickBooks against PayPal settlements and bank statements, flags discrepancies, prepares the month-end journal. Standardises what is otherwise a 6–10 hour manual ritual into a 90-minute review.

3. Cash-flow forecast (30-day)

Ships in the SMB plugin.

Reads invoices outstanding, recurring expenses, scheduled payroll, and projects the next thirty days of cash position. Daily refresh. The single Skill we hear founders thank us for most.

4. Expense report from receipts

Build your own.

Reads a folder of receipt photos (or a PayPal export), extracts merchant, date, amount, category, and produces a structured expense report ready for the accountant. Saves 1–3 hours per fortnight for any team that does any travel or client work.

---
name: expense-report
description: Generate a structured expense report from a folder of
  receipt photos or a PayPal/bank export. Use whenever the user asks
  to compile expenses, submit reimbursements, prepare month-end claims,
  or process receipts. Outputs to Excel with categories, GST, and
  approval column.
---

# Expense report

## Inputs
- Folder of receipt photos OR a PayPal/Stripe export CSV
- Reporting period (default: previous calendar month)
- Cost centre / project tag if applicable

## Categories
Use these exact category names (matches our chart of accounts):
- Travel - flights
- Travel - accommodation
- Travel - ground transport
- Client entertainment
- Office supplies
- Software subscriptions
- Other (flag for manual review)

## GST handling
Australian receipts: extract GST where shown, otherwise mark "GST: TBC".
Foreign receipts: convert to AUD using the receipt date, mark as "GST: N/A".

## Output
Excel with columns: Date, Merchant, Category, Amount (AUD), GST, Notes,
Approver. Sort by date ascending. Total row at bottom.

5. Tax-prep organiser

Ships in the SMB plugin.

Pulls together the documentation your accountant will ask for at year-end — annual P&L, depreciation schedules, payroll summary, GST reconciliation. Skill exists; customise only if your accountant has a specific document order they prefer.

Sales

6. Lead triage

Ships in the SMB plugin.

Reads inbound leads from HubSpot or a form integration, scores them against your ICP, drafts the first-response message. The score is the value — most SMBs cannot afford to chase every lead equally and the triage Skill reveals which ones actually warrant time.

7. Pipeline review

Build your own.

Once a week, Cowork pulls every open deal from your CRM, evaluates stage age, last-activity date, and likelihood, and produces a one-page review with deals at risk, deals ready to push, and deals to disqualify. Replaces a 60-90 minute manual pipeline review.

---
name: pipeline-review
description: Weekly pipeline review pulling every open deal from
  HubSpot. Use when the user asks for a pipeline review, weekly sales
  check-in, deal status update, or to identify at-risk deals.
---

# Weekly pipeline review

## Pull
All open deals where stage ≠ "Closed-Won" and stage ≠ "Closed-Lost".

## Categorise
**Push (good signals):** deal age < 30 days OR last activity < 7 days.
**Stalled (warning):** last activity 14–30 days, no scheduled next step.
**At risk (red):** last activity > 30 days OR stage age > 2× our average.
**Disqualify:** stage age > 90 days AND no activity in 60 days.

## Output
One-page markdown summary. Top section: 3 deals to push this week.
Middle section: 3 stalled deals with suggested next action.
Bottom section: deals to disqualify (with reason).

## Tone
Direct. No filler. Founder reads this in 90 seconds and decides what
to do today.

8. Follow-up email drafter

Build your own.

Reads the last touch with a prospect (from Gmail or HubSpot) and drafts the appropriate follow-up — different tone for cold, warm, post-demo, post-proposal. The Skill encodes when to push versus when to nurture. Cuts sales follow-up time from hours per week to minutes.

Marketing

9. Blog drafter

Build your own.

Long-form post in your voice, optimised for SEO, with internal links and a structure that converts. Covered in detail in our Skills guide. Saves 4–6 hours per long-form post for a marketing team.

10. LinkedIn post generator

Build your own.

Takes a raw paragraph of thought and outputs three post variants — curiosity hook, contrarian hook, personal story. Cuts posting time from 30 minutes to 5. The highest-leverage Skill for any founder doing personal-brand content.

11. SEO meta rewriter

Build your own.

Takes a URL or page title and outputs a <title> and <meta description> optimised for the target keyword, hitting 60/160 character limits. We used this to rewrite metadata on our Tier-S blog posts during our April SEO cleanup — the title rewrites alone moved several pages multiple ranking positions.

12. Campaign analysis

Ships in the SMB plugin.

Pulls campaign performance from HubSpot (or your email platform), compares against previous campaigns, identifies what worked, drafts the brief for the next one. Closes the analysis loop most SMB marketers skip because it takes too long manually.

Operations and HR

13. Meeting notes + action items

Build your own — and build it first.

Listens to (or reads a transcript of) a meeting, produces structured notes with decisions, action items, and owners. The highest-frequency Skill in any team — it gets used multiple times a day.

This is the Skill we recommend every team builds in week three of their 30-day rollout. Low risk, high frequency, immediate visible value. It is also the easiest Skill to iterate on — every meeting reveals what is missing from the format.

14. Onboarding plan generator

Ships in some department plugins (HR plugin in particular).

Takes a role, manager, and start date, and produces a structured first-30-days plan — week-one shadowing, week-two reading list, week-three deliverables, week-four review. The HR plugin from Anthropic covers the generic version. Customise with a Skill if your onboarding has firm-specific rituals.

Cross-cutting (build these first — they compound)

15. Brand voice

Build your own. Build it before everything else.

One page covering tone, forbidden words, sentence structure, formatting rules. Every other writing Skill should reference this one ("defer to the brand-voice Skill for tone — do not duplicate those rules here"). Without it, every other content Skill drifts in voice.

---
name: brand-voice
description: Apply our brand voice to any written content — blog posts,
  emails, proposals, social posts, internal comms. Use whenever the
  user asks for content in our voice, drafts marketing copy, or
  reviews written material for tone.
---

# Brand voice

## Core principles
- Plain English. No buzzwords like "leverage", "synergy", "ecosystem".
- Australian spelling: organisation, optimise, recognise.
- Concrete over abstract: name the tool, quote the number, link the source.
- Founder voice: first-person plural ("we have built", "our clients").

## Sentence structure
- Lead with the result, then the mechanism.
- One idea per paragraph. Three sentences maximum per paragraph.
- Replace passive voice with active voice unless the actor is unknown.

## Forbidden words
synergy, leverage, ecosystem, paradigm, robust, seamless, holistic,
unlock, empower, supercharge, game-changing, revolutionary.

## Voice we are aiming at
Read like an experienced colleague explaining to another experienced
colleague — confident, specific, no padding.

How to actually deploy these — install versus build

If you have a Pro or Max subscription and want fast wins: toggle on the Small Business plugin. You get five of the fifteen Skills above (invoice chaser, monthly close, cash-flow, tax-prep, lead triage, campaign analysis) plus seven curated connectors with no setup work.

If you have a Team or Enterprise plan and want consistency across users: build the cross-cutting Skills (#15 brand voice, #13 meeting notes) at org level first. These propagate to every team member. Then build department-specific Skills (#7 pipeline review, #9 blog drafter, #11 SEO meta) and provision them to the right teams via the private plugin marketplace.

For the configuration steps — global instructions, folder rules, plugin marketplace, per-user provisioning — see How to customise Claude Cowork.

Priority order: which to build first

If you are starting from zero, this is the order we run for clients:

1. Brand voice (#15) — every other content Skill needs it.
2. Meeting notes (#13) — used by everyone, every day. Builds adoption habit.
3. Invoice chaser (#1) — measurable revenue impact within two weeks.
4. Pipeline review (#7) — frees the founder’s Monday morning.
5. Blog drafter (#9) — only if you are publishing weekly.
6. Cash-flow forecast (#3) — install from plugin; customise format if needed.
7. Expense reports (#4) — quick win for anyone who travels or claims.
8. Everything else — driven by which override notebook entries pile up fastest in week two of your rollout.

Eight Skills well-built deliver more value than fifteen Skills built half-heartedly.

Common mistakes

Building all fifteen at once. Pick three. Use them for two weeks. Build the next three based on what you learn. Skills you write before you have used Cowork for two weeks are usually wrong.

Vague description fields. "Drafts emails" fails as a trigger. "Drafts follow-up emails to sales prospects based on their last touchpoint — use when the user asks to write a sales follow-up, post-demo email, or nurture message" triggers correctly.

Skipping brand voice. Every content Skill that does not reference a brand voice Skill drifts. The team ends up rewriting Cowork outputs to "sound right", which negates the time saving. Build it first.

Forgetting the connectors. A pipeline-review Skill needs an MCP connector to HubSpot or Salesforce. A meeting-notes Skill needs access to your transcript source. Pair Skills with the connectors that make them executable — see our explainer on Skills, Plugins and MCP for the layering.

When to bring in help

You can build this whole list yourself with the Skills guide plus two weeks of iteration. We get involved when:

• You want a department-grade Skills library (12–20 Skills bundled into a private plugin) deployed in two weeks instead of two months.
• You need custom MCP connectors for your proprietary CRM, internal database, or sector-specific tools.
• You operate in a regulated industry and need governance — version control, approval workflows, audit logs over who can edit Skills.

At Sandlabs, our AI consulting engagements typically deliver a custom Skills library plus the MCPs to make it executable in two to three weeks.

Tell us about your workflow →

Getting started this week

1. Toggle on the Claude for Small Business plugin if you have not already. That covers Skills 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 12 with zero setup.
2. Write the brand voice Skill (#15). One page. Reference it from every content Skill you ever build.
3. Write the meeting notes Skill (#13). Use it tomorrow. Iterate on it weekly.
4. By end of month, you should have five to eight Skills that get used multiple times a week. That is the bar.

The teams getting the most out of Claude are not the ones with the longest Skills library. They are the ones whose eight Skills are sharp, well-described, and reviewed monthly.

Explore our AI & Claude consulting services →