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.
Claude can write code pretty well, but there are just a few tasks that I need to do to orchestrate everything. If it could do those tasks well even some of the time it would be about 10x more useful.
Honestly though we are finding that a little FDE to set up pre-bake stuff that’s sufficiently specific to the customer is needed. Otherwise people are like, “I don’t need to close the books, I need to do a per-working-day profitability analysis for 10 EU countries with different public holidays”, and they get stuck there.
This opens that surface area of attack again, but now on a much larger scale, if not careful
* 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.
Interesting, sometimes they want to show you they’ll simply charge 2-3 percent of your monthly spend (https://www.datadoghq.com/pricing/?product=audit-trail#produ...)
[1] https://www.arte.tv/en/videos/126831-000-A/arte-reportage/
Example: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/dec/18/why-former-fac...
AGI will solve poverty, btw. Any second now. Just need 500 bil more bro.
Or don’t tell me, if it’s well worth the 24min watch
Payroll/reconciliation is already a couple of clicks and 2 humans sign off. A 'morning brief', well lol.
'Growth', how would you not know your numbers as an SMB? Everything is already in a tool with dashboards and reports for people to act on.
Also, I have zero confidence in the example prompt.
This all seems incredibly uninspired.
No need to have a desktop app to do entry.
Why would I worry about an LLM properly cataloging expenses (book keepers job) when we keep human in the loop with the CPA to check their work?
I think you don’t understand the problem the AI solved/reduced costs on.
IRS is going to make a ton of money off you naive people. Get a better CPA who's not committing malpractice like your current one.
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...
I scaled to 30+ people with automated administration. My cost was under $150 a month for everything we needed to run a successful consultancy and product business. Our accountant was blown away by how simple his life was.
I'm constantly amazed at how it has gotten much worse in the resulting decade.
E.g traditional automation + humans handling the drag = $4,000 per month with a couple of known blunder each year
vs traditional automation + AI = $400, with unknown number of blunders.
Of course it depends how much a blunder costs, to solve, or swallow. But I would bet that accounting errors even for a small business would cost the business on the long run. And that's assuming we don't yet have adversarial behavior which we can expect to come from both the inside and the outside.
> Intuit QuickBooks handles payroll planning, the monthly close, and cash-flow, along with tools to help businesses prepare for tax season, and reconciliation work that touches every other system.
I can't wait for the horror stories, this is going to be fun. Remember last month when Anthropic was like: no, we're not going to refund you even though we admit we're in the wrong for anti-competitively burning credits? These are some of the last things I would trust an LLM with in a small business and on top of it Anthropic has shitty customer support. I will actively be telling prospects to avoid.
This is one of those areas I would spend more time checking the outputs than it would take me to click the button myself.
I’ve used xero and quickbooks and they integrate with many banks and expense management platforms to automate closing.
I run a small business (no employees) and GnuCash was ok. Then I got tired of battling it for years to do certain things.
Spent a few days human coding a command line income and expense tracker a little over a year ago at https://github.com/nickjj/plutus.
I do my estimated quarterly taxes with its assistance in literally 5 minutes. All I do is download the CSV files from my bank and run the reports I'm interested in seeing through it. At the end of the year I run through the full numbers and triple check things in about 10-15 minutes. These numbers give me complete confidence to file my taxes accurately from a business income / expense perspective.
Of course you can use the tool for personal income / expense tracking too. Personal vs business is an arbitrary category name.
Systems like quickbooks, hubspot, payment processors all have tiers where yes on paper they make it easy to properly setup good accounting practices, but you’ll spend an additional 500/month+ to get those features.
Hiring an accountant to clean up the books and do quarterly book keeping is equally as expensive if not more.
Especially for small service based businesses, where margins can be tight, revenue can fluctuate heavily MoM, committing an additional $6k+ per year just to keep books organized is non-trivial.
As an experiment, i gave all our finance data for 2025 to an agent, and it did quite well after spot checking. There may be a middle ground where users can do exports, verify with “real” software, and have agents handle contextual classification to considerably cut down costs
A computer can help you find that problem, but solving it is still a human issue. One of the things people want to know about invoices is which are likely to be paid on time, as some customers consistently delay or attempt to avoid paying.
It's not just about being able to balance Xero but knowing rules, procedures and the way the tax office works.
- an Aussie half-wog
Those three letters "CPA" in one's email signature basically expand to "I won't fall for your low effort form letter bluff, you can't get one over on me that easily" as far as the auditor who's following up on the form letter cares.
Full stop.
From the more obvious possible issues: no payroll, massive refund overpayment, legally binding agreement that puts the business at disadvantage.
FWIW, I like the idea, but I sure as fuck would not let LLM touch real money or pieces that can allow to move it around.
I'm quite sure at the time that they said they wouldn't give compensation, not that they wouldn't refund them.
Anthropic's response: let's make a nice package out of this, and let's target specifically the businesses that are less likely to be ready to manage such horrible events.
Also, small business contracts likely do not have the same type of language around indemnity/SLAs, so it is easier for the harms of this type of system to go unpunished because those who are harmed are even less knowledgeable.
It's just like getting Google support.
This is dangerous. Relying on so much of your business on a third party. We've seen this many times before where businesses get destroyed because something gets broken somewhere that they have outsourced and have no control over.
In my view this service should not be used, unless there is a local llm or clear manual alternative.
Then the question begs - Why use Claude at all?
Maybe a proof of concept only while you come up with a real solution. Maybe to use claude to get rid of Claude
The people who get dazzled by bright lights are going to be the ones licking their wounds later. There is going to be eggs on faces one day.
Must be nice being able to ruthlessly lie with "this is the future" marketing claims, while hiding behind this term of service.
If you don't actually believe in your product's capabilities, why sell it?
It amazes me that we are going to litigate this like they did with cars over horses, or machines vs human labor. I honestly don't think Claude should be running companies.
Murphy’s Law is undefeated. Add in a psycophantic hallucination black box to critical business data and you have a recipe for hilarity.
Normies cannot be trusted to hand off these functions to an LLM because they are mostly incapable of verifying the outputs. Worse yet - these tools are actually idiocratizing the masses to the point they don’t even think they need to.
And of course Anthropic will never have any liability for marketing and selling tools that are unfit for purpose.
Not exactly accounting, but ChatGPT (whatever the paid model was in March) told me that paying down principal early would have virtually no effect on interest over the remainder of the loan. It was confused by the fact that it was a short balloon with payments amortized using a 30 year schedule. I did the math by hand to check and told it it was incorrect and it gave me the classic “oh yeah, sorry about that”. It’s the type of thing where for someone that is knowledgeable about the domain, it wouldn’t pass the sniff test. I am not sure if LLMs have a sniff test.
I can’t imagine how hard this will hallucinate when there are layers of accounting, tax codes, etc. But who will notice when it sounds so convinced it is right?
If you thought society was just an imaginary collective delusion before, now it can be collective hallucination too.
Coders don't all have those kind of security hygiene instincts either
Never in my life would I have thought a business with more than 100 employees could be considered small. In the EU the cutoff is 50.
I know that Google, Atlassian, Microsoft et al have been having access to our emails and online docs for a while… it just strikes me as naive to now sharing everything by default to a single company just like that. They are not just training on internal business data, I would imagine they also have plans to monetise it somehow
Ps.: see http://www.bricklin.com/firstspreadsheetquestion.htm on whether VisiCalc was the first or not.
My point being, they know they need to make a viable business, and they've clearly seen demand. Meaning there are already a lot of small businesses trying to use Claude to do these things.
Given what they have I wouldn't be surprised if they setup a pipeline of niche toolsets that they can spin up in response to mass user prompting.
Not a pretty future for SaaS and side hustles.
Since the "grand" idea is that all they need is the "god model with infinite parameters requiring infinite energy", the business model will align there.
You might be assuming small businesses have less than ten people. That’s a category of small business called a “micro-business” or microenterprise, depending on funding model.
Just today there are 3 stories on front page about Claude--seems to me someones PR is working overtime
My guess is that they are trying to increase the cost of switching as much as they possibly can before the VC subsidies run out and they have to 10x their prices.
Possibly, could also just mean that they've internalized the bitter lesson. https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~eunsol/courses/data/bitter_lesson...
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.
My experience running a few LTDs is that there is a gap between the accountants and what you need, and running an SME business means you are too busy not to do stupid things and the net effect is lost productivity, less entrepreneurial activity and less growth overall. Dealing with VAT, PAYE, and a million other stupid small things prevents most people from succeeding at running an effective business.
Claude and OpenAI have been surveyed to be most impactful to SMEs, and I think it’s only going to accelerate.
Hopefully this is hugely positive, I see risks, but I don’t see real societal downsides if people get AI to make their basic business operations better, cheaper and most importantly simpler and easier.
These takes are so uninformed. We live in a country completely captured by the multi-million dollar advertising campaigns that are meant to make us behave in whatever way makes the 1500 richest people the most amount of money possible.
I know they are trying to get their product to fit-in & justify the massive valuations.
but this ain't it - just like the other Claude for ** -- the market doesn't exist.
if they spoke to small businesses they would know their problems are either around marketing or data.
eSignatures are probably in the top 10 at risk businesses right now. I did eSignatures before, and even I didn't buy a project just vibe coded the signature piece for a recent product.
Feels like they're just using LLMs to produce enormous levels of output, without understanding that quantity ≠ quality.
Good validation that this is indeed a space the frontier firms are thinking about along similar lines.
Large companies can navigate the waters with teams of lawyers and accountants.
I don't think it will be possible to run a small business without AI in the near future, as the complexity of the law will increase beyond any comprehension.
I don't run a small business myself, but I assume the scope of administrative tasks in such company is well defined and understood.
That's rich. What public benefit mission? The benefit of extracting money from the public?
Inspiring quote there.
The funny part is Opus was the one which generated the files in the first place. This was Opus 4.7 High. So no thank you, Anthropic.
If you want to help SMB, stop with the interconnectivity hype of bringing outrageously expensive software together. Try making something that really helps instead of syphens more money and hurts the workforce. Seriously, what's Claude going to do for a landscaper using pen-and-paper anyway? That's the majority of your SMB. The grifting MSPs are your target for this bs.
It has never been easier to give Claude a list of tools you want in your stack and have it get them up and running on your own server, including audits against exploits.
I want that Claude for small businesses, even though I understand why partnering with these other companies is the better revenue play.
Have you ever run a business?
You wouldn't operate in any startup having a public camera streaming your laptop screens, most intimate tactical conversations and strategy to the open internet - so why give that data to companies who's sole goal is to make money?
These "people" fundamentally misunderstand how tech illiterate the average person is and don't care about AI outside it appearing in their search results as an occasional convenience. My Mom (in her 50s) heard about ChatGPT for the first time this month and doesn't care about it, nor eager to figure it out.
Small business owners are not going to put their life's work in the hands of AI, they don't even trust the most basic versions of it and they're certainly not going to use "agents", and the ones that do trust it are naively going to overly trust it because the faulty marketing from these companies and very bad things are going to happen.
Turns out Anthropic is pivoting so fast that they're doing all the 'Claude for X' themselves.
Surely 'Claude for Cheese' is soon.
Our company supports small teams in Germany with the use of agentic AI. We're guinea pigging this on ourselves. There is a lot of friction taking AI into use right now for people who aren't developers. Most tools are aimed at developers and are useless without a lot of complicated hoops that you need to jump through to connect stuff, deal with permissions, etc.
I'm seeing a wider issue that OpenAI and Anthropic seem to just have a few blindspots when it comes to dealing with UX topics and product management. Anthropic seems a bit ahead but not much on supporting business users. But not by a lot.
I'm more familiar with the OpenAI side. I'm a developer, so I can work around it. But I've been onboarding our non developer CEO and friend to codex so he can actually get shit done and it's not been pretty. He's constantly fighting with trying to wrap his head around repositories, git, having to edit small text files, etc.
Despite all this, it's hugely empowering for him to be using codex. I got him working on our website directly (content and design), he has managed to get his inbox hooked up and our google drive. He's working on presentations, sales offers, CRM topics, accounting topics, and more. Not your typical programmer centric topics (aside from the website). It's OK, he's smart enough. But I'd hate to go through this with junior business interns.
The key challenge I see is company level guardrails and skills and permission hell. I got our CEO on codex because in ChatGPT can't use tools or skills. And you need both to get productive. So Codex is the only option right now (in OpenAI). Claude Cowork and Claude for Small Businesses is a good move.
Skills are where you can express organization specific rules, processes, etc. Simple things like when dealing with gmail, don't send emails and only create drafts. Because we want people approving the final email that gets send, always. We have a growing number of those that are specific to our company and tools.
Another challenge I see is dealing with team collaboration tools and AI. We currently have these weird 1 on 1 tools where you have session with an agent to do stuff. But collaborating with more people requires proper team chat tools. That does not exist currently. I have some internal experimental setup involving Matrix, OpenClaw, and some skills that actually is super useful for this. But I would not recommend that for obvious security reasons.
Another challenge is that most things you'd want to connect seem to be completely unprepared for this. This is an industry wide problem that seems to affect most SAAS products with very few exceptions. Existing data silos are going to be connected to AI tools and this is going to escalate fast. So far, there's a lot of mumbling about APIs, cli tools, and not much else. However, most of these products are completely unprepared for an influx of business users wanting to do productive stuff with these tools and AI. There is going to be a lot of friction there and I think a few SAAS companies seem incapable at this point of adjusting their roadmaps and fighting their reflex to deny access to absolutely everything and protect their walled gardens. I think it's going to be a blood bath in that market with customers and users jumping ship to more AI ready alternatives.
We're only four years in to this revolution but especially with Google their level of preparedness with Google Workspace for this is shockingly poor. Gmail access is essentially all or nothing currently. That's going to cause issues. I don't think MS is much further in their thinking. And these two are some of the more clued in companies in the AI space given that they funded and invented most of it.
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.
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.
does "settling" not mean, "writing", ie moving cash around for real
> https://www.media.mit.edu/publications/your-brain-on-chatgpt...
Reviewing automated output is very different from actually doing the task, and results in skill decay and atrophy.
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ironies_of_Automation
The gap between write access and humans just rubber stamping output is not much at all.
SFDC announces "Headless CRM" and Anthropic is like meh.
