When you bought your ticket I asked what eats your week. Thirty four of you answered and six problems came back over and over. We did all six in the room. This page is every one of them written out slowly, so you can do it again on your own on a Tuesday morning.
Freeworks on a free Claude accountPaidneeds Pro, $20 a month
"Emailing: sorting, replying, filing." · "Replying emails and answering phone calls." · "Everything! Predominantly marketing emails and campaigns."
This is the one almost everybody wanted, and it is the easiest of the six. Every step except the last one is free. By the end of it Claude writes replies that sound like you, using your real prices and your real hours, and it never sends anything without you saying yes.
Connect your inbox Free
In Claude, click Customize in the left sidebar, then Connectors, then the + button. Pick Gmail or Microsoft 365 and sign in the way you normally would.
This is your account and your login. Claude can read and draft, and it asks before it sends anything. You can disconnect it in one click from the same screen.
Don't want to connect your inbox? Skip this step. Copy and paste five emails you have sent into a chat instead. Everything below still works.
Let it read how you actually write Free
This is the part nobody expects. It reads your own sent mail and describes you back to yourself. Not your website, which was written to impress, usually by someone else. Your sent mail is how you write when nobody is watching, and that is the voice people reply to.
In Claude, go to Settings → Capabilities and turn on Code execution and file creation. It is off by default and the skill will not appear without it.
Go to Settings → Customize → Skills.
Click the + button, then Create skill, then Upload a skill.
Pick the email-voice.zip file you just downloaded. Do not unzip it first.
On Cowork or Claude Code instead? Run /plugin marketplace add navinramharak-rgb/email-voice
Then: "Learn how I write from my sent email"
MineWhat the email voice skill does
Reads 150 to 300 emails you sent over months, not fifty from one busy week. Then strips signatures, quoted replies and one-liners and tells you how many real ones were left.
Builds one voice per audience. You write to customers, suppliers and staff differently. Averaging them gives you a voice nobody has.
Extracts instead of describing. "Warm and friendly" is useless to a machine. Your five real openers with counts, your exact sign-off, the one line you use to chase money: that gets used.
Finds the moments AI gets wrong. Saying no, chasing money, apologising, bad news. Your actual lines, with other people's details taken out.
Half of it is what you never do. No "I hope this finds you well". No bullet points. No second exclamation mark. That list is what stops drafts sounding like a robot.
Tests it on you first. Three drafts, "would you send this", fix the profile, three more. Your corrections outrank everything else.
Hands you a file that pastes straight into the project. Plus a one-page "how you write" that nobody has ever shown you.
No skill, no problem. The prompt below does the short version. It is worth doing even if you install the skill later.
Paste this
Read my sent emails from the last six months, as many as you can, not just the recent ones. Ignore signatures, quoted replies and anything under a sentence. Don't summarise what they're about.
Sort them by who they went to: customers, suppliers, my team. For each group tell me how I write: how I open, how I sign off, how long I go, whether I use contractions or exclamation marks, and my exact wording when I say no, when I chase money, and when I apologise. Quote my real sentences back to me, with names and amounts replaced by brackets.
Then list the things I never do that most people do in email. Then write it all up as a voice profile I can paste into a project, with rules and examples rather than adjectives.
Read what comes back. If something is off, say so. "I'm warmer than that." "I never use exclamation marks." It will fix it, and the second thing you say matters more than the first.
Put the profile somewhere it stays Free
Make a new Project and call it My Inbox. A free account gets five, which is plenty.
Paste the voice profile into the project instructions. Then add the things you would tell a new hire on day one:
What you sell and what you charge
Your hours, your turnaround, your service area
The three things you find yourself saying every week
Anything you never want said on your behalf
Upload a price list or a service menu if you have one. This is the brain. Everything you do from here happens inside this project.
Draft real replies Free
Start a chat inside the project, not a blank one. That part matters more than anything else on this page.
Paste this
Find the emails in my inbox from this week I haven't replied to. Pick the three that need me most. Draft a reply to each in my voice, using my prices and hours. Save them as drafts in Gmail. Do not send anything.
Open your inbox. The drafts are sitting there waiting for you. Read them, change what you want, hit send yourself.
Fix the ones that are off, in the same chat Free
Do not start over. Tell it what is wrong in plain words and it will redo it. "Shorter.""More like me.""Drop the last line.""That price is wrong, it's 180 not 150."
The second thing you say matters more than the first. This is the single habit that separates people who get value from this and people who give up.
Have it run while you sleep Paid
This is the only part that needs the paid plan. It runs in the cloud, so it fires even with your laptop shut. You open your inbox in the morning and the drafts are already there.
In Claude, click Scheduled in the left sidebar. That is the whole area for this.
Top right, click New task, then Set up manually.
Name it Morning inbox drafts. Paste the prompt below into the prompt box. It runs fresh every time with no memory, so it has to be complete on its own.
Approval mode: set it to run without asking. If it stops to ask permission at 7am, nobody is awake to say yes. It only drafts, so that is safe.
Frequency: daily, 7:00 AM. Leave model and folder alone. Save.
Hit Run now once to test it instead of waiting for the morning.
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Find the emails in my Gmail from the last 24 hours that I haven't replied to. Pick the three that need me most. Draft a reply to each in my voice, using the voice profile and facts in my My Inbox project. Save each as a draft in Gmail. Do not send anything.
Gmail has to already be connected under Customize → Connectors, and the project has to actually be called My Inbox, or change the name in the prompt to match yours.
Nothing sends. It drafts, you decide. That is the whole point.
Then let it build the whole project for you Free
Everything above lives inside one Project. Building that project by hand means staring at an empty instructions box. This is the skill that builds it for you. It interviews you about your business, then writes the instructions and the context files itself, and your voice profile is the first thing that goes in.
Same install as the others: Settings → Customize → Skills → + → Create skill → Upload a skill. Pick perfect-project-builder.zip.
Then just say: "help me set up a Claude Project for my business" and answer its questions.
On Cowork or Claude Code instead? Run /plugin marketplace add navinramharak-rgb/perfect-project-builder
MineWhat the perfect project builder does
Interviews you like a new hire would. What you sell, who buys it, what you say every week, what you never want said. Ten minutes of questions.
Writes the project instructions itself. Rules and examples, not a blank box.
Builds the five context files. Prices, services, hours, the way you talk about the business, the things you say every week. A starter kit with the blanks already marked.
Puts your voice profile in first. If you ran the email voice skill, that file goes straight in and every draft sounds like you from the first chat.
Tests it with a real first output before it hands over, so you know it works instead of hoping.
After this, the project is the brain. Every email chat, every reply, every draft that runs while you sleep starts inside it.
If the replies don't sound like you
Nine times out of ten the voice profile is too vague. Go back into the project and give it evidence instead of adjectives: paste five emails you were genuinely happy with and say "this is the bar, match these."
The other one time out of ten, it is writing like a brand instead of a person. Say "I'm one person, not a company. Write like I'm typing this on my phone between jobs."
Ten of you named this · the biggest number on the list
Leads and new sales.Done
"Lead generation to source clients who need capital." · "How to drive prospective buyers and sellers to my site and convert to clients." · "New sales and researching distributors and big retail chains." · "Finding new clients and effectively deciding which in person events have the most value for me."
Eight of you wrote down leads. When I read what you actually said, you are describing three completely different problems, and the fix for one will do nothing for the other two. So before you touch anything, work out which one is yours. Most people get this wrong and spend a year solving the problem they do not have.
You need a list of real people who have a reason to want what you sell, and a first message that does not read like it went to four hundred others. This is the lane most people mean when they say leads, and it is the one where Claude is genuinely unfair.
Four of you are in this lane.
Get specific before you search for anything Free
This is where it goes wrong. "Find me leads" gets you a list of nothing. "Find me property managers in Edmonton with more than six buildings who posted a job for a maintenance coordinator in the last two months" gets you a phone call.
You probably cannot write that sentence off the top of your head. Have it pull it out of you.
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I sell [what you sell] to [roughly who].
Help me get much sharper about who I'm actually looking for. Ask me one question at a time, and keep going until you can write me a one paragraph description of my ideal customer that is specific enough to actually go and search for.
Include what would have to be true about them right now for them to need me this month, not someday.
Turn Research on Paid
In a chat, click the + button at the bottom left and choose Research. Check that web search is switched on.
Normal search does one lookup. Research runs dozens, each one building on the last, and comes back with a written answer and links you can click. It takes five to fifteen minutes. Ask it, then go and do something else.
Ask for the list, with the proof attached Paid
Paste the description you just built in step one into the brackets.
Paste this
I sell [what you sell].
Here's exactly who I'm looking for: [paste the description from step one]
Find me 20 of them in [where].
For each one give me four things: the name, the person I should be speaking to and their job title, one specific reason I think they need this right now, and a link so I can check it myself.
Skip anyone who already looks locked in with a competitor.
If you can't verify something, say so instead of filling in the gap. I would rather have 12 real ones than 20 with guesses in them.
That last line matters more than the rest of the prompt. Say it every time.
Check three of them yourself before you trust twenty Free
Click three of the links. Is the company real, is that person still there, does the reason hold up. Two minutes.
Do this every time until it has been right twice in a row. Names and job titles are the thing it is most likely to be confidently wrong about, because people move and the internet does not always keep up.
Write the outreach inside your project Free
Take the list into the My Inbox project you built for the email fix, so it comes out sounding like you instead of like a template.
Paste this
Here's a list of people I want to reach: [paste the list]
Write a first email for each one, in my voice, using the profile in this project.
Rules: four sentences maximum. Mention the specific thing you found out about them, not a generic compliment. One clear question at the end. Never say "I hope this finds you well" or "I wanted to reach out."
Save them as drafts. Do not send anything.
Send five, not twenty Free
Send the first five by hand. Wait three days. Look at what came back, or did not.
Then tell it what happened. "Two replied, three ignored me. The two who replied both picked up on the same line. Rewrite the rest leaning into that."
Blasting all twenty on day one means you burn the whole list learning one lesson you could have learned on five.
The mistake in this lane
Treating the list as the finish line. A list is not a lead. Twenty names with nobody contacted is worth exactly the same as no list at all, and it feels like progress, which makes it worse.
Book the time to send them before you generate them.
Lane B
People find me and don't call.
Somebody searched, landed on you, looked for about nine seconds and left. You already paid to get them there, in money or in years of reputation. This whole lane is free and it is the fastest win on this page.
Two of you are in this lane. More of you are in it than know it.
This one is a chain, not a prompt
The other lanes are things you type. This one is three tools that hand off to each other. Find out what's actually wrong. Fix the free thing nobody touches. Rebuild only if you have to. Run them in that order and you will not waste a weekend on the wrong problem.
1. Audit it→2. Google profile→3. Fix or rebuild
Get the honest verdict Free
You cannot see your own website any more. You have looked at it too many times. This is a skill I built for exactly this: it opens your actual site, looks at it on a phone, and tells you what a stranger sees.
In Claude, go to Settings → Capabilities and turn on Code execution and file creation. It is off by default and the skill will not appear without it.
Go to Settings → Customize → Skills.
Click the + button, then Create skill, then Upload a skill.
Pick the website-audit.zip file you just downloaded. Do not unzip it first.
That is it. Now just talk to Claude normally and it uses the skill when it fits.
On Cowork or Claude Code instead? Skip all of that and run /plugin marketplace add navinramharak-rgb/website-audit
Then just say: "audit my website, it's yoursite.com"
MineWhat the audit skill does
It actually opens your site. Desktop and phone. It never guesses from the address.
The five second test. First screen, on a phone: what do you sell, who is it for, what do I do next. Fail that and nothing else matters.
Counts the taps to reach you. And checks your phone number is really tappable, not just text on a page.
Scores seven things out of 100, weighted toward what actually costs you money.
Ends with a decision: fix or rebuild. Everyone else hands you thirty findings. Nobody tells you which job you are on.
Three things, not thirty. Each with what it costs you and how long it takes.
Never invents a number. It measures it or it tells you it could not.
It asks you four questions, then goes and looks. It runs the five second test, which is the only test that matters: from the first screen on a phone, can a stranger tell what you sell, who it's for, and what to do next. It counts how many taps it takes to reach you. It checks whether your phone number is actually tappable. Then it scores it and gives you a straight answer: fix this, or rebuild it.
That verdict is the point. Everybody else hands you a checklist. Nobody tells you which of the two jobs you are actually on.
Do the free thing first, before you touch the site Free
If people find you locally, your Google Business Profile is doing more work than your website, and you have almost certainly never finished setting it up. It is free. It takes about an hour. It moves faster than anything you do to the website.
In Claude, go to Settings → Capabilities and turn on Code execution and file creation. It is off by default and the skill will not appear without it.
Go to Settings → Customize → Skills.
Click the + button, then Create skill, then Upload a skill.
Pick the local-seo.zip file you just downloaded. Do not unzip it first.
That is it. Now just talk to Claude normally and it uses the skill when it fits.
On Cowork or Claude Code instead? Skip all of that and run /plugin marketplace add navinramharak-rgb/local-seo
Then: "I'm not showing up on Google for [what you do] in [your city]"
MineWhat the local SEO skill does
Your Google profile before your website. Free, one hour, and it moves faster than a rebuild.
Fixes your category first. The strongest thing there is for showing up in the map, and it is usually wrong.
Storefront or service area. If you drive to the customer your address should be hidden. Getting this wrong quietly buries the listing.
Builds the review machine. When to ask, the exact text to send, how to reply to a bad one.
Will not build you a review gate. Screening people before they reach Google breaks the rules and can cost you the listing.
Knows Canada. Yellow Pages Canada, Canada411, 411.ca. Most guides are American and skip all of it.
Honest timelines. Profile moves in days, website takes months. Anyone promising rankings by Friday is lying to you.
The single most common thing it finds: your primary category is wrong. That one dropdown is the strongest thing there is for showing up in the map, and a business listed under the wrong one loses its main search in its own city for years without ever knowing why.
It also builds the review machine: when to ask, the exact text to send, how to reply. And it will not build you a system that screens people before they reach Google, because that breaks the rules and can cost you the listing.
Then find out what ChatGPT says about you Free
More people are typing "who's a good [what you do] in Edmonton" into an assistant and taking the first three names it gives them. Whether you are one of those names is now part of whether the phone rings. Almost everything sold as "AI SEO" right now is guesswork. This does the three things that can actually be checked.
Same as above: Settings → Customize → Skills, then +, Create skill, Upload a skill.
Pick the get-cited.zip file you just downloaded. Do not unzip it first.
On Cowork or Claude Code instead? Run /plugin marketplace add navinramharak-rgb/get-cited
Then: "Does ChatGPT know my business? It's [yoursite.com]"
MineWhat the get cited skill does
Three questions, in order. Can an assistant read you? Will it name you when a customer asks? Is what it says about you true?
Finds the blank page. A site that builds itself in the browser looks perfect on your phone and is empty to most AI crawlers. Common on anything made with an AI app builder.
Explains the switch nobody explains. Blocking a training crawler is a fair choice. Blocking an answer crawler is opting out of being recommended. Most people did the second thinking they did the first, because their site builder has one toggle for both.
Asks the customer's real questions. Not "travel agent edmonton". "My parents are turning 70, who can help me take them somewhere warm." Across five assistants, more than once, because the answers change.
Shows you who got named instead, and where that came from. A roundup article, a Reddit thread, a directory, a YouTube video. Almost never their homepage. That is the whole reframe.
Checks what they say about you. Wrong prices, dead services, the old address. Then traces each one to the stale page it came from, because there is no form to correct an assistant. There is only fixing what it reads.
Never invents what an assistant said. Every quote is real and dated. If it was not run, it says not run.
Tells you the truth about certainty. None of these assistants publish how they choose. Nobody can guarantee a result. It measures, shows the gap, and measures again in thirty days.
The most common thing it finds is not clever. It is a single "block AI crawlers" setting that somebody turned on because it sounded prudent, and it quietly took the business out of the running to ever be recommended. Ten seconds to turn off, once you know it is there.
If the verdict was fix: do the top three this week Free
Take the three the audit put at the top and fix only those. Not the other twenty. For most businesses it is the same three: put the phone number where people can see it, say what things cost, and make the button say what actually happens when you press it.
Ask it to write them for you. "Write the new headline, the new first paragraph and the new button text from your own findings. Give me three versions of each."
This is an evening of work and it is usually worth more than everything else on this page.
If the verdict was rebuild: the audit is the brief Free
This is the skill you watched me run on the night. It reads the site you already have, keeps your real words and your real photos, and builds something that looks like it cost far more than it did.
The chain matters here. Do not start from a blank page. Hand it the audit: "Rebuild this site using the audit you just did as the brief. Fix every problem it found." Now the new site is built around the actual reasons people were leaving, instead of just being prettier than the last one.
It deploys free. Full instructions are in the repo.
The mistake in this lane
Chasing new traffic while the site you already have is quietly losing people. If a hundred people found you last month and two called, your problem is not the ones who never arrived. It is the ninety eight who did.
The other mistake is rebuilding first. A rebuild feels like progress and takes three weeks. The Google profile is free, takes an hour, and for a local business usually brings more calls than the new site will. Audit, then profile, then decide about the website.
Do this lane before you spend a dollar on ads, and before you touch Lane A.
Lane C
I'm busy and nothing's working.
You are posting, going to the events, doing the networking, answering the enquiries. You are not lazy and you are not short of effort. You just cannot tell which two of the eleven things you do are the ones actually bringing work in, so you keep doing all eleven. This lane is about stopping, not starting.
One of you named this outright. Several more of you are living in it.
Fill in one table. That is the whole method Free
Not a strategy. A dump. Every single thing you do to get work, including the ones you feel guilty about doing badly. Guess the numbers. A rough guess you write down beats a precise number you never collect.
What it looks like filled in
What I do
Hours /mo
$ /mo
Leads /mo
Closed
$ from it
Keep?
Referrals from old clients
1
$0
3
2
$8,400
KEEP
Instagram posting
12
$0
2
0
$0
STOP
Google Business Profile
0.5
$0
6
2
$5,100
KEEP
Chamber breakfast
8
$340
1
0
$0
STOP
Facebook ads
3
$600
9
1
$1,900
?
Truck signage
0
$40
2
1
$2,200
?
Look at rows two and four. Twenty hours and $340 a month, for nothing. Nobody ever sees that until the hours column sits next to the closed column. That is the entire trick, and it is why this is a table and not a conversation.
Page one is the blank table. Fourteen rows. Fill it in by hand, on paper, in one sitting.
Page two has the prompt that makes Claude tell you what to stop, and the lines to write down what you are stopping.
Photograph page one with your phone and upload it. Claude reads handwriting fine.
Print it, or open it on a laptop and type into it. Bring it to the open hour and I will go through it with you.
One more column that is not on the sheet, because it needs a month to fill: where your last ten customers actually came from. Not where you think. If you do not know, that is the finding, and it is the most useful thing on this page for you.
Ask what to stop Free
Nobody ever asks this. Everyone asks what else they should be doing.
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Here's everything I currently do to get new work, and roughly how much time each one takes me a month:
[your list]
Here's where my last 10 customers actually came from:
[your list]
Tell me what to stop doing. Be specific about which ones, and tell me what you'd expect to happen if I stopped.
Where the two lists don't line up, say so plainly. If there isn't enough here to call something either way, tell me that instead of guessing.
Now ask the expensive question you've been avoiding Paid
Everyone has one. Should I do that trade show. Is that association worth the membership. Is anyone actually hiring people like me on that platform. You have been half wondering for a year because finding out properly would take a full day.
Turn Research on and give it the day.
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I'm a [what you do] in [where]. My customers are [who].
I've got about [hours] a month and [budget] to spend getting in front of people.
Research what's actually available to me: trade shows, local events, associations, networking groups, sponsorships, directories, whatever really exists in my area for my industry.
For each one tell me what it costs, who is actually in the room, whether my customers would genuinely be there, and what a realistic outcome looks like for someone my size.
Then rank them for my budget and tell me which ones to skip and why. Include links. If you can't find real information on something, say so rather than assuming.
Turn it into one page you will actually read Free
Paste this
Turn all of that into a plan for the next 90 days.
What I'm doing, what I've stopped, how much time each thing takes, and one number I should watch to know whether it's working.
Keep it to one page. I'll actually read one page. I won't read five.
Save it in your project. In ninety days, open it and tell Claude what happened. That conversation is worth more than the plan was.
The mistake in this lane
Adding a twelfth thing. You came here feeling behind, so the instinct is to start something new. The answer is almost always the opposite: pick the two that are working, stop four of the others, and put that time into the two.
And if you genuinely do not know where your last ten customers came from, fix that first. Ask every single person who calls you this month how they found you. Write it down. In four weeks you will know more about your business than any prompt on this page could tell you.
Seven of you named this
Invoicing and billing.Done
"Billing, invoices, reconciling receipts." · "Dispatch and invoicing." · "Tracking rent payments." · "Downloading bills from emails and sites like Epcor, Direct Energy, Home Depot, renaming files to go on Google Drive." · "Filling out sequential webforms on a gated site."
Seven of you wrote invoicing, and three different jobs are hiding under that one word. Money coming at you. Money going out. Money you are owed and have not chased. Start with whichever one you thought of first when you read that sentence, because that is the one costing you.
Part 1
The bills coming at you.
Receipts in three different formats, bills buried in your inbox, files called document(3).pdf. The free version of this takes ten minutes and gets you most of the way. The paid version does it without you.
Happening liveClaude, in a browser, fetching a billabout 1 min
On screen: a real login to a real energy account, with Claude doing the clicking. Finding the statement, opening it, downloading it.
Everything so far tonight has been Claude reading something it was handed. This is Claude going and getting it.
Nothing was uploaded. It went and found the file.
The safety question, answered before anyone has to ask: every click is on screen, nothing happens unwatched, and this is not a thing to point at a bank.
Happening liveA month of receipts, sortedabout 4 min
On screen: a folder holding nineteen files and no system whatsoever. document(3).pdf. Untitled.pdf. Four photos of paper receipts, one crooked and blurry. A screenshot of a billing email. A notes-to-self file that is not an invoice at all.
Everyone here has this folder somewhere. It gets connected to Cowork and handed the prompt below.
Four things worth watching for while it runs:
It catches the duplicate, the same invoice saved twice under two different names.
It does not flag the August bill from that same supplier, because that one is a different month. Knowing the difference is the whole game.
The blurry crooked photo goes into CHECK THESE instead of being guessed at.
The notes file gets left alone.
It never guessed once. That is why it can be trusted with money.
Put this month in one place Free
Open a chat and drag in everything. PDFs, screenshots, photos you took of a paper receipt in the van. It reads all of them.
You do not need to tidy any of it first. That is the entire point.
Get it read and totalled Free
Paste this
Here are this month's bills and receipts. Some are PDFs, some are photos, some are screenshots.
For each one pull out: the date, who it's from, what it was for, and the amount. Put it in a table I can paste straight into a spreadsheet.
Then tell me the total, anything that looks like I got billed twice, and anything you couldn't read properly.
Don't guess at a number. If you can't read one, tell me which file and why.
That is your month, in a table, in about ninety seconds. If you stop reading here you have already got most of the value on this page.
Now make the folder sort itself Paid
This lives in Cowork in the Claude desktop app, because it needs to touch real files. Make a folder called This Month, drop everything in, connect it.
Paste this
This folder has this month's bills and receipts. They came from everywhere and none of them are named properly.
Rename every file like this: 2026-09-14-epcor-284.50
Then sort them into folders by who they're from.
Then give me one summary: what I spent in total, what's different from last month, and anything that looks like a duplicate or a mistake.
Do not delete anything. If you can't read a file, put it in a folder called CHECK THESE and tell me why.
Check it, then schedule it Paid
Spot check five files against the originals and look in CHECK THESE. Do that twice. Once it has been right both times, set it up as a monthly scheduled task and stop thinking about it.
Part 2
The invoices going out.
You do the work, then you sit down at the end of the week and rebuild the same invoice from scratch again. This part is entirely free, and the whole job is getting one good example in front of Claude once.
Happening liveOne sentence in, a finished invoice outabout 3 min
On screen: a real skill, in a real chat, turning one line of typing into a branded invoice with the right payment terms already on it.
The invoice is not the interesting part. The interesting part is that it was built once, months ago, and invoicing has not been a thought since. That is the gap between using Claude and setting it up.
One line typed. Real branding, real terms, real invoice.
How it started is the part anyone here can copy this week: one invoice that had already been sent, uploaded once, with a request to work out the template from it. That is step one below.
Give it one invoice you've already sent Free
Do not describe your invoice. Upload one. It will work out the shape faster than you can explain it.
Paste this
Here's an invoice I've already sent.
Work out which parts stay the same every time and which parts change per job. Then build me a template with the changing parts clearly marked.
Also tell me what's missing that should be on there: payment terms, how to actually pay me, what happens if it's late, my business number. Be honest if it looks thin.
That last paragraph catches something on almost every small business invoice. Most of them never say when payment is due, which is why so many of them get paid late.
Make new ones in a sentence Free
Save the template into your project. Now every invoice is one line.
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New invoice. Client: [name]. Job: [what you did]. [hours or quantity] at [your rate]. Started [date], finished [date].
Use my template and my payment terms. Give me the invoice, plus a two line email to send it with.
Then make it a skill so you never explain it again Free
This is the step that turns it from a chat into a thing you own. It is one sentence.
Paste this
Save that as a skill called "make an invoice" so I can run it on any job without explaining my template, my branding or my payment terms again.
That is exactly what the one I showed you is. Nothing clever. Built once, used every week since.
If your invoicing lives behind a login Paid
Some of you are typing the same thing into a multi step form on a portal that will never have a connector. Claude can drive a browser and fill those forms for you, the same way you watched it get the statements earlier.
Being straight with you: this is the fiddliest thing on this page. It works, but it takes setting up properly and it breaks when the site changes. Do not make it your first project. Bring it to the open hour.
Part 3
The ones nobody paid.
This is the one people avoid, and it is the one with money sitting in it. If you take payments through Stripe, Square or PayPal, Claude can read who owes you directly, which means it is working from real numbers instead of your memory.
Happening liveClaude reading a payment accountabout 3 min
Second connector of the night, and the one closest to actual money. This is a Stripe sandbox, not a live account, because real customer names and real revenue do not belong on a projector.
What is sitting in it: $10,330 across five unpaid invoices.
Prairie North Contracting, $4,200. Issued June 16 on Net 30. Sixty two days past terms, and they have stopped replying.
Riverbend Law LLP, $2,400. Issued August 13. Slow but reliable, always lands around 45 days.
Northgate Building Supply, $1,850. Issued July 17. Late on four of their last five.
Glenora Dental Group, $1,200. Issued August 20. Always pays on time, not late yet.
Whyte Ave Coffee Co, $680. Issued September 4. Not even due.
Not one of those numbers was typed in. It read the account.
Then the chase messages. Each customer carries its own payment history, so every message comes out different: firm for the one who is always late, gentle for the one who always pays, and nothing at all for Whyte Ave, because they are not late yet. Catching the one that does not need chasing is the tell that it is reading rather than inventing.
Nothing gets sent. The drafts get read first. That is the human in the loop, and it is the exact thing most people here are nervous about.
The prompt being run
Look at my Stripe account and tell me every invoice that's still unpaid.
For each one: who it is, how much, when it was issued, what the terms were, and how far past those terms it actually is.
Check the customer's payment history too and tell me who has form for paying late.
Sort it by how much money is sitting there, not by date. Show me the total I'm owed.
Ignore anything that's been voided or cancelled.
Don't guess at anything. If a record is unclear, show it to me separately.
Then the chase messages
Now draft the chase message for each one that's actually late.
Match the tone to the relationship. Gentle for the ones who normally pay on time, firmer for the ones who are always late. If someone isn't late yet, say so and don't write them one.
Never threaten anything and never mention legal. Just make it easy to pay and slightly awkward to ignore.
Don't send anything. I'm reading them first.
Connect wherever your money comes in Free
Customize, then Connectors, then the + button. Stripe, PayPal and Square are all there, along with QuickBooks and a lot of others.
Spend the first day only asking it to look. "How much is outstanding right now?""Who has paid me more than once this year?" Once you trust what it sees, let it start drafting.
Ask who is actually late Free
Not who feels late. Against your real terms, from your real records.
Paste this
Look at my Stripe account and tell me every invoice that's still unpaid.
For each one: who it is, how much, when it was issued, what the terms were, and how far past those terms it actually is.
Check the customer's payment history too and tell me who has form for paying late.
Sort it by how much money is sitting there, not by date. Show me the total I'm owed.
Ignore anything that's been voided or cancelled.
Don't guess at anything. If a record is unclear, show it to me separately.
Most people find one they had completely forgotten about. That single line usually pays for the evening.
No connector? Paste the list instead Free
Nothing here needs a connector. Export it, paste it, or upload a screenshot of your spreadsheet. It does not need to be tidy.
Paste this
Here's who owes me money and how long it's been: [paste or upload]
For each one, tell me how overdue it actually is against my terms, and draft the chase message.
Match the tone to the relationship. Gentle for the ones who normally pay on time. Firmer for the ones who are always late. Ask me which is which if you can't tell.
Never threaten anything and never mention legal. Just make it easy for them to pay and slightly awkward to ignore.
Send the first one today Free
Not all of them. One. The one you have been putting off the longest, which is almost always the biggest.
Then save it: "Save that as a skill called chase unpaid invoices." Run it every second Friday.
The rule for all three parts
Never let it invent a number. Put "don't guess, tell me if you can't read it" in every prompt you write about money. A total that looks finished and is wrong is the only genuinely expensive mistake available to you here.
And do one month by hand, watching, before you schedule anything. You will find out exactly where it gets confused, and your second set of instructions will be much better than your first.
Nine of you named this
Data entry and tracking.Done
"Inputting data for my dashboards." · "Tracking and tracker updates." · "Tracking addresses and payments between my business partner and myself. Running accounting numbers." · "Due diligence, underwriting, project status updates."
Every one of these is the same shape. Information arrives in a mess and has to end up in a tidy row. Screenshots, e-transfer confirmations, a photo of a receipt, a PDF, a forwarded email. You retype it. That is the job, and it is the one Claude is best at.
Rather than a made up example, this is a real one of mine: a folder I actually keep, and the spreadsheet Claude keeps current from it.
Happening liveA real team’s expenses, tidiedabout 5 min
On screen: the actual expense folder for Brown Ballers FC, a real soccer team with real costs. Screenshots, e-transfer confirmations, receipts, documents, in no order at all.
Then the master spreadsheet built from it, which Claude keeps current in Cowork. Nobody types any of it in. The folder is the input.
Not a demo built for tonight. This is how the team actually runs.
Watch for the trace-back: one row in that spreadsheet, followed back to the exact screenshot it came from. Everything else tonight could have been staged. That part cannot.
Start free, in one chat, before you build anything Free
Prove it works on one batch before you set up a folder. Drag in whatever this week arrived as. Screenshots, photos, PDFs, forwarded emails.
Paste this
Here's this week's stuff. Some of it's screenshots, some are photos, some are PDFs.
Pull it into one table with these columns: [list your actual column headings]
If something isn't in there, leave the cell blank and put a note in the last column saying what was missing. Don't guess and don't fill anything in from what you think it probably was.
Give it to me so I can paste it straight into Google Sheets.
Paste, check, done. That alone replaces most of an afternoon and it costs nothing.
Or build a tracker you do not have yet Free
The folder above is about tidying something that already exists. This is the other half: making the thing you have been meaning to build for two years. It takes about ninety seconds.
Paste this
Build me a job profitability tracker as a spreadsheet.
I run a [your business]. For every job I want to know: date, client, what the job was, what I quoted, what I actually spent on materials, how many hours it took me, and whether I made money on it.
Work out the margin for me, in dollars and as a percentage, so I never have to.
Add a summary at the top: total jobs this month, total profit, average margin, and my best and worst job.
Then flag any job under 20% margin so it is obvious at a glance.
The spreadsheet appearing is the obvious win. It is not the good bit. The good bit is asking it one more thing:
Then this
Now add a second tab that shows which type of job makes me the most money, and tell me which one I should stop quoting.
Now it is not a spreadsheet. It read the thing it just built and told you what to stop doing.
Show it one good row instead of explaining Free
This is the trick on this whole section. Do not describe your system in words. Upload a screenshot of your tracker and say:
Paste this
Row 4 is filled in exactly the way I want every row to look. Work out the rules from that row and tell me what you think they are before you do anything.
Make it say the rules back to you. Nine times out of ten it gets them right, and the one time it does not, you just found the thing that was going to go wrong later.
Now point it at the real folder Paid
This is the Brown Ballers setup, and it is the only part that needs a paid plan. It lives in Cowork, in the Claude desktop app, because it needs to open your actual files. Put the spreadsheet and the raw stuff in one folder and connect it.
Paste this
My tracker is in this folder. Row 4 is filled in the way I want every row to look.
Go through everything else in the folder and add a row for each one, matching that format.
Rules: don't change any row that's already there. If you can't find something or you're not sure, leave that cell blank and add a note in the last column. Don't guess and don't make anything up.
When you're done, tell me how many rows you added and which ones you weren't confident about.
Check the first ten by hand, then schedule it Paid
Every time, the first time. Open the source, open the row, compare. Then read everything it flagged. After two clean runs you can stop checking the middle and only read the flags.
Then set it to run on a schedule. Friday afternoon is the good slot: the tracker is current before Monday morning and you did not open it once.
If your pile is documents rather than numbers Free
Two of you wrote due diligence, underwriting and project status. Same folder, same flow, one extra instruction that matters enormously:
Add this to your prompt
Quote the document and give me the page or section for every answer, so I can check it myself.
If you're working something out rather than reading it directly, say so. If it isn't in there, say "not in the document."
At the end, list anything that looks unusual or worth a second look, even if I didn't ask about it.
Then spot check three of the quotes, not the answers. You are not checking whether the summary sounds right. You are checking whether the thing it quoted is actually on that page. Do that once and you will know exactly how much rope to give it.
Never let it guess
A blank cell you can see is worth ten filled cells you cannot check. Put "if you're not sure, leave it blank and tell me" in every instruction you write for this kind of job, and for documents add "quote the source."
Wrong data that looks finished is the only real danger on this page. Those two sentences remove it. And this is a reading job, not a deciding job. It finds the numbers and shows you where they came from. You still make the call.
Six of you named this
Content and marketing.Done
"Predominantly marketing emails and campaigns." · "Social media or inventory." · "Brand development, making content, a marketing and lead intake plan." · "Making content for my new business."
This one is not really a writing problem. Most of you know exactly what you want to say and have no time to sit down and say it. So this is about getting it out of your head and into a send, in one sitting, sounding like you.
Give it your voice before you give it a job Free
Do this once and everything after it sounds like you instead of like a press release. New project, then upload five things you actually wrote. Old emails, captions, even a long text message you were happy with.
Paste this
Here are five things I've written. Work out how I actually write: sentence length, what I do and don't say, how I open, how I close, words I use and words I'd never use.
Write it up as a voice profile I can keep in this project.
Be specific and be blunt. "Conversational and friendly" is useless to me. Tell me what I actually do.
Save that into the project instructions. This is the single highest value ten minutes on this page.
Connect the tool you already send from Free
Customize, then Connectors, then the + button, then browse. Mailchimp and Constant Contact are both there, along with a lot of others.
If yours is not in the list, that is fine. Skip this step. Claude writes it, you paste it in. You lose about ninety seconds.
Brief it like a person, not a robot Free
Paste this
Write the email for [what you're promoting].
Who it's going to: [describe your list in one line]
What I want them to do: [the one action]
Why now: [the reason this email exists today]
Use the voice profile in this project. Subject line under 50 characters. No exclamation marks. Don't oversell it.
Then build it as a draft in Mailchimp. Do not send it.
"Why now" is the line most people skip and it is the one that decides whether the email is worth sending at all.
Read it once, properly Free
This is the human in the loop, and it is thirty seconds. Is the offer right, is the price right, does it sound like you, would you be happy if your best customer read it. Then approve.
Turn one thing into five Free
Paste this
Take that email and turn it into five short pieces for social. Keep my voice. Punchy, no fluff, no hashtags. One of them should work as a caption on its own with no image.
You wrote one thing. Now you have a week.
Earn it in this order
When you connect a new tool, spend the first week only asking it to look things up. "Which campaign did best last month?" "Who opened the last three and never clicked?" Once you trust what it sees, let it draft. Once you trust the drafts, let it build them. Do it in that order and you will never get a bad surprise.
And the one hard rule: never let it invent a testimonial, a customer story, or a result you cannot back up. It will write you a beautiful case study about a client who does not exist. Put "only use things I've actually told you, and flag anything you're making up as an example" in your project instructions and leave it there.
Five of you named this
Quotes and proposals.Done
"Quotes, trip planning and group booking coordination." · "Scheduling meetings with prospective clients." · "Scheduling site visits for third party engineers at client locations." · "Sending the same proposal to different clients."
You think you lose quotes on price. You lose them on Tuesday afternoon, when the other guy already replied. And you lose them to the proposal itself: the same wall of text every time, one number at the bottom, and "please don't hesitate to contact us" where the next step should be.
This is your second project. Not My Inbox. A project is a hire, and you would not give one person a single set of instructions for replying to email and for winning work. Same voice profile, pasted in again. Different job, different files, different rules. That is the whole model: one project per job, one voice across all of them.
Happening liveFive proposals, three won, two lostabout 3 min
On screen: a folder with five proposals from the same sign shop. Three won. Two did not. They go in together with one question: what did the winners have that the losers didn't?
Watch for it finding the pattern nobody wrote down. The winners open with what the client said. Three prices, not one. Days on a timeline. One thing to do at the end. The first loser has none of that: two paragraphs about the company, one number, no dates, "please do not hesitate."
Then watch for the second loser, because it is the interesting one. It has the right shape. It looks exactly like a winner. The client said they had about $1,500 and the cheapest option is $4,200.
Structure wins. Structure is not enough. The second one copied the template and still lost by not listening.
Then it turns what it found into rules for the project, and builds one reusable proposal with the changeable parts marked. From here a new proposal is one sentence.
Make the second project Free
New Project, call it Proposals. Open My Inbox, copy only the voice profile out of its instructions, and paste it into this one. Not the reply rules, not the rest. The voice is the part that carries over. The job description is new.
Then upload what this job needs and My Inbox does not: your price list, your rate card, your minimums, what you charge for a rush job. And add one rule: "Never invent a price. If it isn't in the files, say so and ask me." That sentence is the whole safety system for this section.
The autopsy: find out why you win Free
Upload your last five proposals to the project. The ones that won and the ones that didn't. If you only have winners, upload winners. It still finds the pattern.
Paste this
I've uploaded five proposals I've sent before. Three of them won the work and two didn't. Work out what's the same in every one that won and what changes per client. Then look at the two that lost and tell me, for each one separately, what was missing or what went wrong. Be blunt. If the two lost for different reasons, say so.
Then turn what you found into a short list of rules I can paste into this project's instructions, so every proposal from now on follows the pattern that wins.
Then build me one proposal I can reuse, with the parts that change per client clearly marked.
Read the first half before you look at the template. That is where you learn something about your own business. Then paste the rules it wrote into the project instructions. That is the moment the project learns. Everything it writes for you after this follows the pattern that wins.
Request in, proposal out Free
Now a real one. Start a chat inside the Proposals project and paste the email or the message as it arrived, typos and all.
Paste this
Here's a request that just came in:
[paste the email or message]
Using my price list and the rules and template in this project, give me three things:
1. The proposal, with the client-specific parts filled in and the price itemised
2. A short email in my voice that sends it
3. A follow-up to send in four days if they go quiet
Then tell me anything you had to assume, and anything I need to decide before this goes out. If they told me a budget, make sure at least one option sits inside it. If a price isn't in my files, say so, don't guess.
The assumptions list at the end is the part to read first. That is where a wrong quote shows itself before it leaves your outbox.
Offer real times, not "let me know when works" Free
Google Calendar is a connector, same place as Gmail, free on every plan. Customize, then Connectors, then the + button. Once it is on, the email that sends the proposal can offer three actual slots instead of starting a four-day game of message tennis.
Add one line to the prompt above: "Look at my calendar and offer them three times next week for a site visit. Nothing before 9, nothing after 4, and not on a day I already have two things."
Those rules are the whole thing. It reads your calendar correctly, but it does not know you hate 8am unless you say so once. Read the three times before they go out. It does not know you promised to pick someone up at four.
If you have to line up three calendars at once, a client, a subcontractor and you, bring it to the open hour. It works, and it is a longer prompt than fits here.
The follow-up that chases itself Paid
Same as the email section. Scheduled in the left sidebar, New task, Set up manually, weekly on Monday at 8am, approval mode set to run without asking.
Paste this
Look through my sent mail for any quote or proposal I sent more than four days ago that hasn't had a reply. For each one, draft a short follow-up in my voice, using the voice profile in my Proposals project. Gentle, one line, easy to answer. Save each as a draft in Gmail. Do not send anything.
Most quotes are not lost. They are forgotten, by the person who asked for them. This is the nudge you never get around to sending, sitting in your drafts every Monday.
One project per job
You now have two: My Inbox and Proposals. Same voice in both, different instructions, different files. That is how the rest of this goes. A Bookkeeping project that knows your chart of accounts. A Content project that knows your audience. Each one is a hire with a job description, and the voice profile is the thing you hand every one of them on day one.
"Never invent a price" goes in every project that touches money. And read the assumptions list every time. It is short, it is at the bottom, and it is the difference between a quote you sent and a quote you checked.
That's all six
Want the slow version?
Everything on this page happened in two hours, which is fast. The free course is the same material taken slowly, one lesson at a time, built and tested in your own business as you go.
Twenty four lessons. No cost. Start at lesson zero if tonight was your first time opening Claude, or skip straight to whichever of the six you want to go deeper on.