What would Claude Cowork cost, and what would it hand back?

Yes. Anthropic includes the Claude for Small Business plugin on every paid Claude plan, and there is no separate charge for it. You pay for the Claude seats: Pro is $20 a month for one person ($17 a month billed annually), and Team Standard seats are $25 a month each ($20 billed annually) with a two-seat minimum. Prices checked October 11, 2026.

Anthropic recommends Pro for one person and Team for a business with more than one. Team adds central billing, admin controls for connectors and SSO, and by default Anthropic doesn’t train on Team data. Premium Team seats ($125 a month, or $100 billed annually) give a heavy user about five times the usage of a Standard seat.

From the time a person spends writing something that Cowork can draft from your inbox, job software or books. The calculator subtracts the minutes someone still spends reading and approving each draft, because at Workahead nothing goes to a customer without a yes. Task counts and minutes are Workahead estimates for a small trades office. Replace them with yours.

The estimator sends Cowork the site notes, photos or a voice memo. Cowork drafts the quote in your format, with line items priced from your past jobs, and the estimator checks and finalizes it. Jobber’s official Claude connector can’t create quotes, so in a Trades Office Manager setup the draft goes to the estimator to enter or paste into Jobber. Where your setup supports it, a third-party connector such as Composio can push the draft in directly. We confirm which route works during the audit.

Two ways, kept separate so nothing is counted twice. Follow-ups on quotes already waiting for an answer add a few points to your close rate on those open quotes. Faster quote building can add new quotes on top, and those are priced at your normal close rate. Both count only gross profit (your margin), not revenue. A small margin lift from more consistent quotes applies only to the quoted work you already win. Extra quotes also use up the estimator time they need, so those minutes aren’t counted again as time saved.

Because it isn’t new money. An invoice paid four days early was going to be paid anyway. The calculator counts only overdue dollars that would otherwise be written off. It shows cash collected sooner on its own line, and that only adds to the net if you enter a cost of capital, such as the interest on a line of credit you’d otherwise draw. The 4-day default comes from Intuit’s own data: customers using AI-drafted QuickBooks reminders were paid 4 days faster on average than with standard reminders (March 2025 to March 2026). It’s a vendor figure, not an independent study.

No. We didn’t find an independent primary study measuring how much consistent quote follow-up raises close rates, or how much reminders cut write-offs, for small trade businesses. Those defaults are Workahead estimates set low on purpose: 3 extra points on open quotes and 3% of overdue dollars recovered. Track your own close rate and write-offs for a month before and after.

A short summary Cowork writes on a schedule from your connected tools, so you don’t have to open each one. A daily briefing covers yesterday’s calls and leads, today’s jobs, cash that came in and anything overdue. A weekly briefing covers revenue, quotes won and still waiting, money owed, payroll hours and your review rating. A monthly briefing looks at profit and margin trends by job type and, if those channels are connected, marketing spend against booked jobs. The point is faster decisions on staffing, bidding and market focus. Example lines: “Crew B is booked for 46 hours next week, so overtime starts Thursday.” “Water heater swaps won 7 of 9 quotes this quarter at a 44% margin; panel upgrades won 2 of 8 at 28%.” “North-side jobs from Google leads booked at twice the rate of other sources.” Owner’s Weekly Numbers is the entry version, built around the weekly briefing.

The core is your books (QuickBooks), job software (Jobber), payroll (Gusto), Gmail and your calendar, your phone system and Google reviews. Marketing channels such as Google Business Profile, Google Ads, GA4, Meta and your email platform can be added if a connector is available for your accounts. Connector coverage changes, so the AI Readiness Audit checks what your accounts support before anything is promised. If a source can’t be connected, the briefing says so instead of guessing.

Because an owner hour usually costs more than a staff hour. The calculator values briefing time at the owner rate you enter ($60 by default, an example) and staff work at the staff wage plus taxes and benefits. If the owner also builds the weekly numbers report in the task table, set that row to 0 so the same time isn’t counted twice. The Solo preset already does this.

It can be, but it isn’t proven, so it’s off by default. The growth case is in three kinds of decisions: staffing (moving work between crews before overtime, or hiring when the backlog says so), bidding (chasing the job types you win at a good margin and repricing the ones you don’t) and market focus (putting ad money and crew time into the services, neighborhoods and lead sources that pay best). We don’t have a reliable dollar figure to cite for small trade businesses. If you switch it on, keep the amount small and treat that net as the optimistic case. The weekly Usage & Savings Audit is how Workahead measures what actually changed over time.

Each size fills in starting counts: Claude seats, lead replies, follow-ups, review requests, invoice reminders, scheduling replies, quotes built, open quotes, overdue invoices and which owner briefings are on. It also picks a plan. Solo starts on Owner’s Weekly Numbers with one Pro seat. Small crew, Growing shop and Established start on Trades Office Manager, priced higher as the shop grows. These are Workahead example values set on the low side, not survey data. Wages, minutes per task and the money estimates stay the same at every size, and any number you change switches the picker to Custom.

No. Choose “No setup help” and the calculator shows Claude seats only, with the same hours and money. That assumes you build the workflows, connect the tools, test them on real email and jobs, and get the team to use them. Workahead’s fee pays for that setup, for getting staff to approve drafts every day, and for the weekly measurement that shows whether the hours and money are real. If you can do those yourself, the do-it-yourself line is the honest comparison.

Employers pay more than the wage for every hour worked. In the BLS Employer Costs for Employee Compensation release for June 2026, private-industry benefits averaged $14.07 an hour on top of $32.82 in wages, about 43%. The calculator applies that to the wage you enter. The default wage is the May 2025 BLS median for secretaries and administrative assistants, $23.23 an hour. Receptionists were $18.27. If the owner builds the quotes, the real cost of that time is higher.

Usage limits, other software, and your own setup hours if you do it yourself. Each Claude seat has weekly usage limits, so a team running heavy scheduled work may need a Premium seat or usage credits. Add any new subscriptions in the “Other monthly tools” field. It also leaves out revenue from answering missed calls, which the missed-call calculator covers.