How to Connect Better Proposals to Excel (4 Methods Compared)

The Problem With Getting Workbook Data In and Out of Better Proposals

You have an Excel workbook full of data — client names, pricing tiers, line-item details, project scopes. You need it in Better Proposals, or you need Better Proposals data back out into the workbook for reporting. Neither direction is trivial.

Better Proposals is good at building beautiful, trackable proposals. But the moment you want that proposal data in a workbook — for win-rate analysis, revenue forecasting, or pipeline review — you're stuck exporting CSVs, pasting rows by hand, and re-formatting everything. The usual flow is: export from Better Proposals, open the file, clean the columns, match the headers to your report workbook, paste the data in, and hope nothing changed in the source.

Below are the four common ways teams handle this. Only the last one scales.

Method 1: Manual Copy-Paste

The default. Open Better Proposals, go to your proposal list, download the CSV export, open it in Excel, strip the columns you don't need, and paste the cleaned data into your report workbook. You reformat the date columns. You fix the currency field that came in as text.

The thing about proposals is that they keep moving. A proposal that was "opened" on Monday might be "signed" by Thursday. Which means the workbook you built on Tuesday is already stale. Every time the pipeline shifts — a new send, a signature, a payment — someone has to go back in and update the numbers manually. The cleanup never ends. It's not that any single update takes long; it's that the updates never stop arriving.

Method 2: Power Automate

Power Automate has Better Proposals connection options. You can wire up a trigger on a proposal status change, call the Better Proposals API, and write the result back to an Excel worksheet.

Before you go further — do you know what a cloud flow is? A Power Automate connector? A trigger condition? Field mapping between a JSON response and a table column? If those feel like a different language, this path isn't yours right now. Skip to Method 3 or 4.

For the readers still here: the flow works. You set up a trigger on status change, map the fields you want into worksheet columns, and the automation fires when a proposal moves. That part is real and reliable.

But a status-change trigger fires one record at a time.

You can get a row written when a proposal is signed. What you can't easily get is a full retrospective pull — all proposals from the last quarter, with their complete history, in one batch. That's not what event-driven automation does.

You probably just need to see the whole pipeline in a workbook. You probably have no idea how to configure a scheduled batch pull in Power Automate — and why would you. So it gets handed off to the person on your team who builds flows, and you end up checking in on Slack tomorrow morning.

And once you need to filter by currency, aggregate by deal stage, or join proposal data against a second worksheet, you've left the straightforward connector path entirely.

Method 3: The Previous Generation — Connector Add-Ons

Until recently, the best option for repeatable workbook ↔ Better Proposals workflows was a category of add-ons that let you manually configure column mappings and saved templates. You picked your range, you tagged your fields, you saved a config, you ran it.

That was a real step up from copy-paste. Output was consistent, configs were reusable, the team didn't have to redo formatting every run.

But you were still responsible for the template design, the field mapping, the schedule, the conditional logic about which rows to include, the renaming of columns. The tool got the data through, but the thinking was still on you. And the moment your proposal schema changed — new status field, new currency column, renamed client identifier — your config broke until someone went back in and fixed it.

This is the previous generation. It worked, but it asked a lot of the operator.

The Easy Way: Using SheetXAI in Excel

There is a different way entirely. SheetXAI is an AI agent that lives inside your Excel workbook. It reads the workbook, understands what you are looking at, and through its built-in Better Proposals integration it can push to or pull from Better Proposals for you. No template configuration, no automation glue, no summarizing your data by hand. You just ask.

Example 1: Pull the full pipeline into a workbook

Pull all Better Proposals data into my Excel table with columns: proposal ID, title, client company, status, deal value, currency, created date, and sent date — include all proposals regardless of status

Every proposal in your account lands as a row. The status column reflects whatever Better Proposals has at the moment of the pull — sent, opened, signed, paid, all of it.

Example 2: Create company records from a list of client names

For each company name in column A of my Excel table, create a Better Proposals company record and write the returned company ID to column B

The pattern: instead of cleaning the data first and then moving it, you ask for both in one prompt. SheetXAI handles the write and the writeback inline.

Try It

Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open any workbook with proposal data or client lists, then ask it to do one of the tasks above. The Better Proposals integration is included in every SheetXAI plan.