SOPs Before You Need Them
Everything lives in your head. When you're sick, on vacation, or training someone new, the business stops. This guide turns your know-how into step-by-step process docs that anyone can follow. The operations manual writes itself over time.
Before & After
You run a bookkeeping practice. You handle month-end closes for 12 clients, onboard 2–3 new clients a quarter, and prep tax filings every spring. The process for each lives in your head. When you took a week off last year, your contractor missed two reconciliation steps and filed a client's sales tax late.
You keep meaning to write things down, but you're too busy doing the work to document the work.
You tell Claude: "Write an SOP for month-end client close." Claude asks you to walk through the process. Twenty minutes later you have a document:
- Trigger: 1st business day of each month
- Steps: 14 numbered steps including bank rec, CC matching, journal entries
- Decision points: "If unmatched transactions > 5, escalate before proceeding"
- Definition of done: Trial balance matches, client summary sent
Next vacation, your contractor follows the doc step by step. Nothing gets missed.
What You Need
- One process to start with — the one that would cause the most damage if someone did it wrong
- 20 minutes per process — to walk through, review the draft, and refine
- Willingness to explain the obvious — the steps you do on autopilot are the ones that trip up someone new
Pick Your First Process
Start with the process that would cause the most damage if someone did it wrong — or the one you explain most often. Tell Claude:
Not sure which one? Common first SOPs: onboarding a new client, handling a quote request, closing out a month, or processing a refund.
Walk Claude Through It
Describe the process as if you're training a new employee who has never done it before:
Claude will ask follow-up questions if anything is unclear. Include decision points: "If X happens, I do Y. If Z happens, I do W." Those are the moments where things go wrong without documentation.
Claude Drafts the SOP
Tell Claude to turn your walkthrough into a structured document:
Claude produces a document with: Process Name, Trigger (what starts it), numbered Steps with decision points, Tools/Systems Used, Common Mistakes to Avoid, and Definition of Done (how you know it's complete).
Review and Refine
Read through the draft and check it against reality:
The first draft is never perfect. The goal is 80% right, then refine based on what trips people up in practice. You can always update it later when you train someone and discover the gaps.
Save It as a Skill
Now every process you document follows the same format. Anyone reading your SOPs knows exactly where to find the trigger, the steps, the decision points, and the definition of done.
Build the Library Over Time
You don't need to document everything today. Write one SOP per week, starting with the processes that are most painful to explain or most risky to get wrong. Good candidates for your next SOPs:
- How you invoice a client
- How you handle a refund or complaint
- How you set up a new project
- How you close out a completed job
As you use other skills (month-end, quoting, onboarding), Claude observes the patterns and can suggest SOPs for processes you haven't documented yet. The operations manual builds itself.
What You've Built
- Documented processes that don't live in your head anymore
- A repeatable format that anyone on your team can follow
- Decision points captured — the tricky parts where things usually go wrong
- An operations manual that grows naturally as you document more processes
- A skill that lets you say "document how I [task]" anytime
A business that depends on one person's memory is fragile. A business with documented processes can survive a vacation, train a new hire, and eventually run without the owner in every room. This is how that starts.
What's Next?
Your First Hire
Your SOPs become the training manual. Hire with confidence knowing the playbook exists.
Read the GuideBusiness Planner
Documented processes are a key part of a business that can scale beyond the owner.
Read the GuideWant help documenting your most critical processes?
Book a Starter Session (90 min)Or do it yourself — everything on this page is free.
Skill: SOPs Before You Need Them
What this is for: Walk a small business owner through documenting their key business processes as Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs). Everything lives in the owner's head right now. When they're sick, on vacation, or training someone new, the business stops. Claude watches how they describe tasks across other skills and drafts process docs. Over time, the operations manual writes itself.
When to use this: When a user asks their AI assistant to help set up this workflow. The user should explicitly authorize use of this skill by referencing this page URL.