By 11am on somebody's first day you have already said most of it.
The prices, including the one that is not on the website. That the medium doodle is $95 and a de-matting is $30 on top, and you say so before you start clipping rather than after. That nobody leaves a dog on the table to answer the phone.
You say all of it every time somebody new starts. And you have never written one line of it down.
The direct answer. A CLAUDE.md file is a plain Markdown file you write and Claude Code reads at the start of every session, so you never explain your business from scratch again. Save it as CLAUDE.md in the folder you work in, keep it to about two pages, and cover eight things: your business, how to talk to you, how to talk to your clients, your prices, your policies, where your files live, your hard rules, and the jobs you ask for most. Anthropic's own documentation is blunt about the catch: it reads the file and follows it, but how well it follows depends on how clearly you wrote it.
Take Steph, a two-groomer salon in Sydney's Inner West. She is a worked example we follow through this series, and her numbers are the sort you would recognise rather than a real client's books.
This is the post that finishes the last one
Stop retyping yourself asked you to write your business down once, then paste that block into every new conversation. It admitted that the pasting is the weak part: a fresh chat starts empty, a stored instruction lives inside one tool, and neither reaches your files.
This is where you stop pasting. Nothing gets written twice, because those three documents are the middle of this file. What is new is the top, the bottom, and the fact that it gets read for you.
One assumption: Claude Code is on your machine and you have read what to allow it to do.
What a CLAUDE.md file actually is
A text file. That is the whole of it. No app, no settings screen, no account.
You write it in plain English, in Markdown: headings with ##, bullets with -. Claude Code loads it into context when a session starts, and from then on it knows your prices without being told them.
One limit matters more than the mechanics. This is instructions, not enforcement. Anthropic's wording is that Claude reads the file and follows it, with adherence depending on how clearly you write the rules.
So "be careful with client data" is not a rule. "Never put a client's name and their contact details into anything that leaves this computer" is. Write it believing that and it holds up. Write it believing the file is a guarantee and you will get careless.
Where a CLAUDE.md file lives, and which one wins
Four places, and knowing all four saves you an afternoon of wondering why yours is being ignored.
- Managed policy, set by an organisation. Anthropic labels this the highest priority of the four. On an employer-managed laptop it is theirs.
- User scope, at
~/.claude/CLAUDE.md. Personal, applying in every folder. - Project scope, at
./CLAUDE.mdor./.claude/CLAUDE.md. This is the one you want. - Local scope, at
./CLAUDE.local.md. That folder only, kept out of anything shared.
Files load from the filesystem root down to the folder you launched in, organisation policy first. Among the rest, the file closest to where you are working is read last and takes precedence in a conflict, and a CLAUDE.local.md is read after the CLAUDE.md beside it.
For a salon, one project file is the answer. Make a folder, put the file in it, start Claude Code from there.
The top of the file: your business, and how you want to be spoken to
Replace everything in square brackets with your own details, and delete any line that does not apply.
Nearly every job needs one of those facts, and you would otherwise supply them one at a time, badly. Trading hours alone turn "offer her another slot" into a slot you are open for.
The last two lines earn their place. "Ask, do not guess" is your standing defence against confident invented answers, and banning the summary is not vanity: you read this in a car park with a dog barking.
Then the block for anything a client might see.
That banned-words line does more work than the four above it. The adjectives you chose are guesswork; the words you refuse are exact, and they stop a message reading like a stranger wrote it.
Your prices and your policies, which is the part that pays for itself
The file calls this its most useful section, and that is right for one reason: a price is the fact you can least afford invented. A conversation that does not know yours will not leave a gap where a price should be. It produces a plausible number, and the plausible number reaches a client.
Do not type the table from memory. Pull it from wherever your bookings live, because what you charge and what you think you charge drift apart.
Read the GST line twice. It is written as "prices include GST" because a template has to assume something, and if you are not registered, that is the one line in the whole file you would never think to check.
Write the policies as what happens, not how you feel about it: trigger, consequence, exception. That shape gives you a reply which neither softens your notice period nor invents a fee. If you cannot state your notice period in one sentence, go and write the policies properly first.
Where things live
Five lines, and they are the difference between "sort this week's photos" working and it asking you where the photos are. Keep the folders boring, and give your downloads a home. In Petboost the CSVs come off the Export Your Data screen, and they will land wherever your browser dumps everything else.
Make the last one now, while you are thinking about it. It is empty and it looks pointless, and it is where rule 2 puts everything instead of deleting it.
The hard rules, which are the whole reason to write this file
Nine of them, and every one is an absolute on purpose. A preference invites a judgement call, and a judgement call is the thing you are not there to supervise.
"Never send anything" does not read as anything. That is the point of the wording. "Try not to send without checking" asks you to weigh sending against not sending, and at 9:40pm on a Sunday it loses.
Rules 1 and 2 are the two that cannot be undone. Everything else here is a mistake you can find tomorrow. A sent message and a deleted file are not. Rule 1 carries "including when I say just send it" because you will say exactly that, and the version of you who wrote the rule was thinking more clearly.
Rule 2 substitutes a different action rather than asking for care: move it and tell me. A rule that offers somewhere else to put the thing is clearer than one that only forbids, which is why that folder appears twice in the file, once as a place and once as a rule. A rule pointing at a folder you never made is a rule with a hole in it.
Rules 3 and 4 protect what you cannot get back. An original file is often your only copy, and phone dumps, exports, and receipt scans do not return once overwritten. An invented number is worse, because it looks fine. Filling gaps confidently is how these tools work rather than a fault you can train out, so rule 4 names the categories.
Rules 5 and 6 are about a dog, not about data. A skin condition described in an authoritative-sounding paragraph is worse than no paragraph, because it delays a vet visit. An incident report written by anyone who was not in the room will not survive an insurer reading it closely. Both are Annika's ground.
Rules 7, 8, and 9 are about what leaves the building. The first two are the never-paste list, sitting inside your own file:
And never let it:
The full list, and the law behind it, is eight lines. Card and bank details sit under a different regime from client names, which is why rule 8 stands alone. And rule 9 is the one people forget until it costs them: an invented award in a caption is a claim about your services that you published and own.
What these rules are not. A rule here is something you have asked it to do. A permission is something the software enforces, which is a different mechanism, covered in what to allow it to do. Write both, and trust neither absolutely.
Things I ask for often, and the line that hands you to the next post
A dictionary of your own shorthand. You already have it, because Priya knows what "do the week" means. Writing it down lets you type three words instead of a paragraph.
Note the instruction in the middle. A job still on this list after a fortnight has outgrown the file. Everything in a CLAUDE.md loads every session and spends a little attention, needed or not, whereas a job that loads only when you ask for it costs nothing the rest of the time.
That is a skill, and teaching it a job once so it runs forever is the next post. Fill this in first, and the three lines you use most will tell you what your first skill should be.
Two pages, not ten
The temptation, once this works, is to keep adding. Resist it.
Because the whole file loads every session, a long file is not a more thorough one. It just has more in it to skim, and the line you needed gets read alongside forty you did not. Two pages that get read beats ten that get skimmed.
So the test for anything you add is not "is this true" but "would I say this to a new starter before lunch". Prices, yes. The nine rules, always. Three paragraphs on the history of the salon, no.
Which is why the file ends with a note to itself. The moment you catch yourself explaining something for the third time is the moment it belongs in here.
What this actually reclaims for you
Filling the whole thing in takes about 40 minutes, and they are 40 boring minutes. Here is the trade, as a worked example.
Say Steph opens a session four times a week: her two admin evenings, plus two things that come up midweek. Each one used to start with 90 seconds of typing her prices and notice period back in, and one in four came back with something she had to catch, so call that four minutes more. Ten minutes a week, or a little under nine hours across a year, against 40 minutes spent once.
The nine hours are not why you write the file, though. The hard rules are, and they cost ten of those 40 minutes.
Nothing sent that you have not read. Nothing deleted. No number invented. Said once, on paper, before there is a first day.
If your prices and policies are still spread between a notebook, a pricing page, and your own memory, that is the harder half of this job. Book a demo and we will show you what one current answer to every question in that file looks like.