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Claude for Small Business

anthropic.com

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Re: Claude for Small Business

#271

Post by StilesCrisis »

ElFitz wrote: post #160
puchatek wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The future is perpetually dealing with the fallout from all the vibe coding as the pool of people who'd have a shot at fixing it gets smaller and smaller. Shitty will be the new normal.

> Shitty will be the new normal. I’ve heard the same from the best devs, and some who thought themselves to be the best, I’ve known long before LLMs were ever a thing. I’m sure others heard the same when JavaScript and Python became near ubiquitous. When PHP emerged. When C supplanted Fortran and COBOL. When these two took over from Assembly. When punch cards went the way of the dodo. There’s always someone for whom…

> I’m sure others heard the same when JavaScript and Python became near ubiquitous. When PHP emerged.

You heard right! Most JavaScript and PHP in the world _is_ profoundly shitty. It's taken 20 years of intense research to make JavaScript compilers that are almost good enough to mostly optimize away the design foibles of the language.

Re: Claude for Small Business

#273

Post by pwarner »

throwatdem12311 wrote: post #238

There is going to be so many horror stories that will come from this, ie. Claude overpaid/underpaid my employees, Claude hallucinated the tax code and now the IRS is seizing my assets. etc… 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 incapa…

I doubt an LLM is calculating withholding. I presume 99.9% of the actual logic will still execute in QuickBooks or Paychex etc. Lots of this sounds like cross system orchestration against well defined APIs. Yes, there's still danger, it could use the APIs wrong, but humans can use the GUI wrong too

Re: Claude for Small Business

#274

Post by 0x6c6f6c »

adam_patarino wrote: post #262
windexh8er wrote: post #240

> PayPal powers settlements, invoicing, disputes, and refunds inside Claude. > 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…

Closing books and running payroll feel like solved problems with today’s saas and high stakes if you mess up. This is one of those areas I would spend more time checking the outputs than it would take me to click the button myself.

What are some of the alternatives that are worthwhile for this?

Re: Claude for Small Business

#275

Post by tclancy »

Ucalegon wrote: post #211
tclancy wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Play the ball, not the man, dude. Hectoring people on the Internet because you're stressed out about something isn't going to magically fix how you feel. Digging into their profile to make it personal is three steps too far.

We are talking about one person's introduction of a technology to persons and the implications of that action within the framework of enterprise governance and risk, it is one in the same. If anything, who a person is, their knowledge of the domain and the associated implications that action has on the domain has relevancy where someone who is ignorant of implications may have more grace than someone who has the expe…

What we are talking about is the conclusion you leapt to from 20 seconds of looking for evidence to suit a conclusion. Nothing in their comment "These are largely friends and peers, so they ultimately own their own risks" insists these are all people working in or on healthcare. Friends could be ... friends? Like the kind outside of work. And if someone is a peer (again, we have to assume the "at work" part), there isn't much you can do to prevent them from doing what they will. Educating them about trigger safety may be the best thing you can do.

Re: Claude for Small Business

#276

Post by adam_patarino »

0x6c6f6c wrote: post #274
adam_patarino wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Closing books and running payroll feel like solved problems with today’s saas and high stakes if you mess up. This is one of those areas I would spend more time checking the outputs than it would take me to click the button myself.

What are some of the alternatives that are worthwhile for this?

Gusto makes payroll zero clicks.

I’ve used xero and quickbooks and they integrate with many banks and expense management platforms to automate closing.

Re: Claude for Small Business

#277

Post by tiffanyh »

throwatdem12311 wrote: post #238

There is going to be so many horror stories that will come from this, ie. Claude overpaid/underpaid my employees, Claude hallucinated the tax code and now the IRS is seizing my assets. etc… 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 incapa…

Aren’t all of these problems solved just by Claude asking the user to confirm that $X should be paid.

Re: Claude for Small Business

#278

Post by raincole »

mettamage wrote: post #131
CSMastermind wrote: post #53

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…

> 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. I haven't tried it, or know a lot about it, but isn't this the whole claw thing?

Depending on what an average user looks like in your mind. For me openclaw is the opposite of a tool designed for an average user.

ChatGPT/Claude's web ui is much more like something for average user, tbh.

Re: Claude for Small Business

#279

Post by spacephysics »

prawn wrote: post #255
windexh8er wrote: post #240

> PayPal powers settlements, invoicing, disputes, and refunds inside Claude. > 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…

I suspect that the time spent on accounting or the money spent on accountants will influence decisions made by small-small business owners (1-5 staff range), in that some will take these risks. Admin is a huge pain for very small businesses.

Accountants can be expensive, especially if your books are messy, or have poor accounting practices from the start.

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

Re: Claude for Small Business

#280

Post by scronkfinkle »

mhitza wrote: post #127
tim-projects wrote: post #97

> Claude helps take the late-night work off their plates. 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 us…

> D.3. Limitations of Outputs; Notice to Users. It is Customer’s responsibility to evaluate whether Outputs are appropriate for Customer’s use case, including where human review is appropriate, before using or sharing Outputs. Customer acknowledges, and must notify its Users, that factual assertions in Outputs should not be relied upon without independently checking their accuracy, as they may be false, incomplete, m…

Maybe I'm misreading but that is an absurd ToS in this context. So they're telling us they have a solution to a problem, but don't trust it enough to solve it? I tend to be averse to analogies but this feels like hiring an engineering team to build a bridge, and they tell you they're not liable if the bridge fails and collapses when used to spec.

If you don't actually believe in your product's capabilities, why sell it?

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