The Scenario
The invoicing cycle opens Monday. A consulting firm's operations lead needs total hours logged in Asana's time tracking for each of 12 client projects over the past billing period, broken down by user. The billing sheet is in Excel. The data is in Asana. They have never connected cleanly.
Last month, someone on the team spent Friday afternoon pulling each project's time entries individually from Asana, pasting into a staging workbook, running a pivot, and hoping nothing fell through the cracks. An entry from a contractor who logged against the wrong project almost cost the firm a $3,000 billing discrepancy.
The bad version:
- Open Asana project 1, navigate to time tracking, filter to the billing period.
- If there is a report or export option, use it. Otherwise, read the entries off the screen and type them into the billing sheet.
- Open project 2. The interface for time tracking looks slightly different in this project because a different team set it up.
- After completing all 12 projects, run the pivot and notice that user "J. Carter" and "Jordan Carter" are being treated as two different people because of a display name inconsistency.
Billing accuracy is not a place for manual processes with hidden failure modes. Especially when the data is already in a system that can return it programmatically.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent inside your Excel workbook. It reads the project GIDs and date range from your workbook, pulls all time tracking entries from Asana, and writes the results into a billing-ready format with user emails rather than display names.
For each project GID in column A of this Excel sheet, pull all time tracking entries from Asana and write them into the 'TimeLog' sheet with columns: project name, task name, assignee, hours, and entry date.
What You Get
- One row per time entry across all listed Asana projects
- Columns: project name, task name, assignee email (not display name), hours, entry date
- The "TimeLog" worksheet is cleared before writing — re-running always gives a clean, non-duplicated result
- Projects with no time entries for the period appear in the log with "No entries" so you know the coverage
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
You need entries filtered by a specific date range stored in the workbook
Fetch all time tracking entries from Asana for workspace [ID] created between the dates in cells B1 and B2 of this workbook. For each entry, write task name, project name, user email, duration in hours, and date into the 'TimeLog' worksheet.
You need the output summarized by project and user for direct use in billing
Pull all time tracking entries from Asana for projects in column A for the period in B1 to B2. Write raw entries to the 'TimeLog' worksheet. Then write a summary to the 'BillingSummary' worksheet: one row per unique project-user combination showing total hours for the period.
Time entries include both internal and client-billable work, and you need them separated
Pull all time tracking entries from Asana for projects in column A for the billing period in B1 to B2. Write all entries to 'TimeLog'. For entries where the task has a custom field "Billable" set to "Yes", also copy them into a 'BillableOnly' worksheet. Write a total hours figure for billable entries to cell A1 of 'BillableOnly'.
Validate GIDs, pull entries, summarize, and flag projects below a minimum hours threshold in one prompt
For each project GID in column A, verify it exists in Asana before pulling time entries. Write raw entries to 'TimeLog' and a per-project-user summary to 'BillingSummary'. For any project where total hours are below the value in cell C1, write "Below Minimum" in a new column next to that project's rows in 'BillingSummary'.
One prompt covers validation, the detail pull, the billing summary, and the floor check.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open your billing workbook with project GIDs and date range — ask SheetXAI to pull all time entries and build the billing summary before Monday's invoicing run. You can also see how to export project status for the same client reporting package, or return to the Asana hub for the full workflow list.