How to Use Claude Projects to Run Parts of Your Business
10 min read
Learning how to use Claude Projects is the step that turns a chat window into something that knows your business: each Project keeps its own instructions, reference files and chat history. This lesson shows which Projects to create and what to put in them.
A plain chat starts empty. You explain your prices, the chat ends, and tomorrow you explain them again. A Project is a room where the explanation stays on the wall.
What a Project holds
- Instructions. A standing brief Claude reads at the start of every chat in that Project. The next lesson gives you a template.
- Knowledge. Files you upload once: a price list, a policy, three sample emails. Claude consults them in every chat there.
- Chats. Conversations filed in one place, so last month's quote for the Hendersons is where you'd look for it.
- Its own memory. What Claude learns inside a Project stays in that Project and doesn't leak into the others.
Projects are on every plan. Free accounts can create up to five.
Project or plain chat?
| Use a plain chat when | Use a Project when |
|---|---|
| It's a one-off question | You do this kind of work every week |
| No business facts are needed | The answer depends on your prices, policies or tone |
| You won't need to find it again | You'll want the history later |
If you catch yourself pasting the same background into a third chat, that background belongs in a Project.
The five Projects worth creating first
Five slots on the free plan forces a useful discipline. For most small businesses we work with, this split covers the week:
- Customer replies. Knowledge: your FAQ, refund and warranty policy, hours, service area, three replies you were happy with.
- Quotes and proposals. Knowledge: rate card, standard scope wording, payment terms, two proposals that won.
- Marketing. Knowledge: a voice guide, your offers, past newsletters and posts that did well.
- Money. Knowledge: chart of accounts, the list of regular vendors, your invoice wording. Exports go in per chat, with customer names stripped.
- Operations. Knowledge: checklists, SOPs, the staff handbook, supplier contacts.
Client-service firms split differently. A bookkeeping practice does better with one Project per client, which keeps one client's numbers from bleeding into another's. AI for bookkeepers in Canada shows that setup, and it needs a paid plan once you pass five clients.
Create one in five minutes
- Go to claude.ai/projects, or open Projects from the sidebar, and click New Project.
- Give it a name and a description. These are labels for you. Claude doesn't read them.
- Click Set project instructions, paste your brief, and save.
- In the knowledge panel, click the plus button and upload your files.
- Start a chat from inside the Project. A standalone chat you want to keep can be moved in later from the chat's menu, with Add to project.
What to upload, and what to leave out
Upload what's stable and what you'd hand a new hire on day one. Short files beat long ones. A two-page price list gets used correctly more often than a 60-page catalogue, because Claude has less to wade through.
Put a date in every file name: Price list 2026-10.pdf. Six months from now you'll want to see at a glance which file is stale.
Leave out anything on the stays-out list from the last lesson, and anything that changes weekly. A Project that quotes last spring's prices with full confidence is worse than one that asks.
Where Projects break
Chats in a Project don't read each other. Tuesday's chat can't see what you settled in Monday's unless it reached the Project's memory or you added it to the knowledge. When a chat produces something lasting, like new policy wording, save it as a file and upload it.
Knowledge goes stale quietly. No alert fires when the uploaded price list falls out of date. Put a 15-minute review on the first Monday of each month.
Big libraries need a paid plan. On paid plans Claude switches to a retrieval mode that Anthropic says stretches a Project's capacity by up to ten times. On Free, keep the knowledge lean.
A Project is still one person's. Sharing a Project with colleagues, with view or edit rights, is a Team plan feature.
For the idea taken further, one master document that every Project reads first, see the business brain lesson in our advanced course.
Try it now
Create the one Project that matches your most repeated job. Upload three files, no more. Skip the instructions for now and ask it a question you answered for a customer last week. Note what it got wrong. Those gaps are your instructions, and writing them is the next lesson.