Free AI prompts for small business owners

61 practical, copy-and-paste prompts for ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok and other AI assistants. Each one has [placeholders] to fill in and a short note on how to use it well.

Browse by category

• Bookkeeping & Finance

  Cash flow, pricing, invoices and the month-end close.

  8 prompts

• Marketing

  Positioning, local SEO, newsletters and promotions.

  8 prompts

• Customer Emails & Service

  Complaints, refunds, delays, FAQs and saved replies.

  8 prompts

• Hiring & HR

  Job posts, interviews, onboarding and feedback.

  7 prompts

• Sales

  Outreach, discovery calls, proposals and follow-ups.

  7 prompts

• Operations

  SOPs, planning, vendors, inventory and KPIs.

  8 prompts

• Social Media

  Content calendars, captions, short video and brand voice.

  7 prompts

• Legal & Admin Basics

  Contracts, policies, licenses, records and applications.

  8 prompts

Popular prompts to start with

• Build a 13-week cash flow forecast

  Bookkeeping & Finance

  Turn your bank balance, expected receipts and bills into a week-by-week cash forecast that shows when cash gets tight and what to do about it.

• Reply to an angry customer complaint

  Customer Emails & Service

  Draft a calm, specific reply to an upset customer that acknowledges the problem, takes the right amount of responsibility and offers a clear fix.

• Write a job post that attracts the right people

  Hiring & HR

  Turn your notes about a role into a clear, honest job post that describes the work, pay and schedule so the right candidates apply.

• Turn a messy process into a standard operating procedure

  Operations

  Describe how a task gets done (even messily) and get a clear step-by-step SOP that someone new could follow without asking you questions.

• Write my value proposition and tagline options

  Marketing

  Get a clear one-sentence value proposition plus tagline options that say who you help, how, and why you instead of the competitor down the street.

• Summarize a contract in plain English

  Legal & Admin Basics

  Get a plain-English summary of a contract or lease, with key dates, money, obligations and risky clauses flagged as questions for your lawyer.

How to use these prompts

1. Open a prompt and press Copy prompt.
2. Paste it into your AI assistant and replace every [BRACKETED] part with your real details. The more specific you are, the better the answer.
3. Read the result critically. AI can be confidently wrong, so check facts, numbers and anything legal or financial before you rely on it.

Tip: remove account numbers, passwords and customers' private details before pasting anything into an AI tool.