The Scenario
You are the owner of a 15-person studio. It is the last week of the quarter and finance needs the billing report.
You have 8 employees who have been logging time across 15 Basecamp projects for the past 3 months. Finance needs billable hours per client in an Excel workbook. The data is in Basecamp. It is just not in the workbook yet.
The bad version of this week:
- You log into Basecamp, go to the Timesheet report for each project
- You read entries on screen and manually copy them into the workbook
- On project 8, you realize you missed two entries in project 3 because the date filter was off by a day
- You go back and fix it
- You have burned a morning and you are halfway done.
The fast version is one prompt.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent inside your Excel workbook that pulls every Basecamp time entry for the date range you specify, directly into the workbook.
Open the SheetXAI sidebar and type:
Pull Basecamp timesheet data for the last 90 days into my Excel table with columns: employee, project, task, hours, date. Then add SUMIF totals by project at the bottom.
SheetXAI calls Basecamp's API for the specified period, pulls every time entry across all projects and employees, writes the data into the workbook, and adds project-level subtotals.
What You Get
An Excel workbook populated with every Basecamp time entry for the quarter, plus totals:
- Employee name — column A
- Project name — column B
- Task — column C
- Hours — column D
- Date — column E
- SUMIF totals by project — at the bottom of the table
Finance gets a ready-to-invoice summary. No manual copying, no missed entries.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Timesheet data always needs shaping before it becomes a billing report.
When you need SUMIF totals per employee as well as per project
Finance wants both a project-level subtotal and an employee-level subtotal.
Pull all Basecamp timesheet entries for the date range in cells B1:B2 and write employee, project, date, hours, and task to the Data tab starting at row 2. Then in the Summary tab, add a section for project totals and a separate section for employee totals, each with a grand total at the bottom.
When you need to flag employees who logged no time
Three employees may have submitted nothing this quarter.
Fetch all Basecamp timesheet entries for the period in cells B1:B2. Write them to the Data tab starting at row 2. Then compare the employee list in the Staff tab column A against the employees in the pulled data. List any employees with zero hours in a new section called "Missing Timesheets" below the main data in the Data tab.
When you need to separate billable from non-billable time
Some time entries are non-billable. The invoice should include only billable hours.
Pull all Basecamp timesheet entries for the date range in cells B1:B2. Write all entries to the Data tab starting at row 2 with a "Billable" column. Below the main table, create a filtered section with only billable rows and a total billable hours sum at the bottom.
When the client needs a formatted per-project summary in a separate tab
Finance wants raw data in the Data tab and a formatted per-client summary in the Summary tab.
Pull Basecamp timesheet data for the date range in cells B1:B2. Write all raw entries to the Data tab. Then in the Summary tab, create one section per project with the project name as a heading, employees and hours as rows, and a total at the bottom of each section.
The pattern: pull once, structure in the same prompt. Raw data and the finance-ready view in one instruction.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open a blank workbook, then ask it to pull your Basecamp timesheet data for any date range. The Basecamp integration is included in every plan. See also how to bulk-create Basecamp to-dos from an Excel sprint plan or the Basecamp in Excel overview.