Best Claude Skills for Small Business: 10 Ranked, All Free on GitHub

We publish 35 Claude skills for small business, and the question we get most is which one to install first. Not all 35. One.

This is the ranking. The best Claude skills for small business, in our experience, are the ones that take a job you do every week, hold your rules and your numbers between sessions, and refuse to make things up when the data runs out. Ten made the cut. Each entry below says what the skill does, shows a worked example, and links the page where you can read the file before you install it. The GitHub install is at the end.

How we ranked the best Claude skills for small business

Three criteria, in order.

Hours given back in a typical week. A skill that saves an evening a month outranks one that saves five minutes a day, because the evening is the one you'd otherwise lose.

Speed to payoff. Some skills are useful in the first session. Others only earn their keep in month two, once they've learned your vendors or your roster. Faster payoff ranks higher, with one exception at number three that's worth the wait.

Built-in rules. Every skill in the library forbids invented numbers and flags what it can't resolve. The ones near the top go further: mandatory disclosures, human review before anything sends, a stop before any decision that belongs to a professional.

This is a practitioner's list from client work. It's not a download count. The library is ten weeks old and install numbers would tell you nothing yet.

The top 10

1. Bookkeeping Copilot (finance)

It learns your chart of accounts and your regular vendors once, then categorizes a bank or card export with the uncertain items marked UNSURE and the anomalies named. Say you run a two-van cleaning company and paste 92 transactions from June: 86 come back categorized, a $340 hardware charge is flagged for your ruling (supplies or equipment?), an $89 software charge on June 12 and 13 is called a likely duplicate, and fuel is up 22% on the same number of jobs. Every response ends by telling you to have your accountant verify anything important. Bookkeeping Copilot.

2. Customer Support Autopilot (support)

Paste a support email and get three things: a triage line, a draft reply in your voice built from your real policies, and an internal note listing what to confirm before sending. A customer writes that order #4471 has said "processing" for nine days and they need it for a weekend event; the draft apologizes, commits to a status check today, offers expedited shipping if it hasn't moved by tomorrow, and the note reminds you to confirm both before you hit send. Nothing goes out without a human. Customer Support Autopilot.

3. Cash Flow Copilot (finance)

The slow burner. The setup interview captures payroll dates, rent, the big accounts that pay net-45, and the balance below which you stop sleeping. Then it holds a rolling 13-week picture from a two-minute weekly paste. A Winnipeg print shop installed it in September; in week three the projection showed a dip to $9,200 in early November, a seasonal slowdown and a lease renewal landing in the same fortnight, seven weeks out. Two levers were offered: chase the older net-45 invoice and shift the renewal by three weeks. November's actual low was $16,100. Cash Flow Copilot.

4. Proposal Studio (sales)

Stores your services, your rate card and two or three proposals that won, then turns raw call notes into a scoped draft priced only from your rates. A five-person branding studio pastes notes from a prospect who wants a rebrand and "maybe a website": the rebrand comes back as three options at $6,500, $9,000 and $14,000 from the stored card, the website is marked PRICE NEEDED because no rate exists for it, and a gap flag notes that budget never came up on the call. Notes to sendable draft, about fifteen minutes. Proposal Studio.

5. SOP Studio (operations)

Record yourself explaining a task the way you'd train a new hire, paste the transcript, and it asks the gap questions before it writes. A cafe owner talks through the opening routine; the skill asks what happens when the espresso machine pressure reads low and where the till float comes from, then produces a one-page 14-step checklist and a training version that explains why fridge temperatures get logged first. Steps it inferred rather than heard are marked CONFIRM. In her case two of them were wrong, which is the point of the mark. SOP Studio.

6. Shift Scheduler Copilot (staff)

Learns the roster, the hard rules and everyone's availability once, then builds each week from memory and keeps a fairness ledger. By week three a restaurant owner with fourteen staff types "build next week, Sam requested Friday off" and gets the draft plus a note that Sam had last Friday off too while Jess covered both, so the trade should run the other way. At month's end the pattern flag is blunt: Tuesday close has had one qualified person available for five straight weeks, which is a hiring problem wearing a scheduling costume. Shift Scheduler Copilot.

7. Review & Reputation Manager (support)

Drafts an honest review-request sequence timed to when customers are happiest, answers every review in your voice, and turns a month of reviews into an operations note. For a two-van appliance repair company: a text three hours after the job, one email four days later, then stop. A 2-star review ("tech was late, no call") gets a 61-word reply that names the fix and offers a direct contact. The monthly summary counts three lateness mentions in June against none in May and points at Friday scheduling instead of the wording of the apology. Review & Reputation Manager.

8. Accountant Handoff Pack (finance)

Builds the month-end or year-end package before your accountant has to ask for it: a checklist of what's gathered and missing, the categorized export with UNSURE items called out, a duplicate and missing-receipt sweep, a ranked question list, and a one-page cover memo in the accountant's terms. An Ontario salon owner closing July pastes two card statements and a QuickBooks export and gets 148 transactions categorized with six flagged, a note about a second booking-software subscription that started in May, and a memo that opens with the known issues. One email out, one reply back. Accountant Handoff Pack.

9. Hiring Assistant (hiring)

Enforces the order most small businesses skip: define success, build the rubric, write the interview kit, then read applications against it. A three-location bakery hiring its first shift supervisor gets a posting, a rubric that weights reliability evidence at 35%, and an interview kit that opens with "tell me about a time you had to run something when the person in charge wasn't there." Twenty-three applications come back scored with cited evidence, four flagged for human judgment, and a standing reminder that no rejection goes out without the owner's review. Hiring Assistant.

10. Referral Program Copilot (sales)

Turns referrals from a thing you remember twice a year into a system with a memory. A bookkeeping practice seeds it with the client list and last year's four referrals; month one produces an ask-ready list of three names with reasons ("year-end cleanup praised two weeks ago, never asked"). By month four it has noticed that three of five referrals came from restaurant owners and suggests the next asks lead with the two restaurant clients nobody has asked yet, blurb drafted. Referral Program Copilot.

The other 25, by job

The rest of the library, grouped the way the toolbox is. Each category page holds the skills alongside the prompts and workflows for that job.

• Finance: AI Spend Auditor, Finance Analyst Copilot, Grant Finder.
• Support: Complaint Resolution Copilot, Customer Insights Copilot, Knowledge Base Copilot.
• Operations: Inventory Manager, Meeting Ops Assistant, Ops Automation Planner, Prompt Library Builder, Quality Control Copilot, Scheduled Tasks Copilot.
• Hiring and staff: Onboarding Copilot, Recruiting Pipeline Manager.
• Sales: Discovery Call Copilot, Sales Pipeline Copilot.
• Marketing: Content Repurposing Studio, Email Marketing Copilot, Marketing Growth Engine, SEO Audit Copilot, Website Design Studio.
• Strategy: Business Plan Copilot, Competitor Radar, The Idea Grill, Quarterly Goals Copilot.

Get the Claude skills from GitHub

All 35 live in one public repo, VexloCa/toolbox, MIT-licensed. Every skill is a folder under skills/ with a SKILL.md inside, in the format Claude reads natively, plus a README that carries the problem, the install steps and a worked example. If you searched for Claude skills on GitHub for finance or support and landed on developer lists, this is the small-business one.

In Claude Code, Cursor, Codex or any agent that runs the skills CLI, one line lists the library and lets you pick:

npx skills add VexloCa/toolbox

Add --skill bookkeeping-copilot (or any folder name from the list) to install a single one. In the Claude apps, zip the folder and upload it under Customize > Skills. That works on every plan, Free included, and our Claude skills guide walks through the clicks and the ChatGPT route.

Where this breaks

A skill is a text file your assistant follows, which means it's only as safe as its contents. Read the file before you install it, ours included, and run anything from an unfamiliar repo through the free Skill Check first.

The rules inside a skill reduce invented numbers. They don't eliminate them. A model can still misread a messy export, so totals get checked before they're posted and anything touching tax, payroll or a contract goes past a professional. The finance skills say this at the end of every response on purpose.

One skill per job, too. Two skills that both read expense exports will contradict each other if they share a Project, so give each its own.

Where to go next

Pick the number on this list that matches the job you dread, install that one, and give it two weeks before you judge it. If you're new to skills, the guide to Claude skills for small business explains what they are and how to install one; if your pain is money, the finance category has the full set.