The Scenario
You are a finance director at an 85-person company. The board presentation is Thursday at 2 PM. The CFO has asked for a full employee headcount breakdown: every employee, their department, job title, start date, and current salary, in a single Excel-ready table.
BreatheHR has all of it. Getting it out in a usable form is the problem.
The slow version:
- Export the employee report from BreatheHR as CSV
- Open Excel, import it into the workbook
- Realize the salary field is not in the export
- Navigate to the salary section of BreatheHR separately
- Export that as a second CSV
- Import that into a second tab
- Write a VLOOKUP joining employees to salaries by ID
- Fix the mismatched IDs where BreatheHR used different formats
- It is Wednesday evening and eleven rows still have blank salary cells.
The fast version is one prompt.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI reads BreatheHR across record types and writes everything into your workbook in one go.
Open the SheetXAI sidebar and type:
Pull all BreatheHR employees into the Headcount tab of this workbook. Include employee ID, full name, email address, department, job title, company join date, and current salary from the salary records. One row per employee. Sort by department, then by last name.
SheetXAI calls BreatheHR, pulls employee records and salary records, joins them, and writes the sorted table into the Headcount tab. No VLOOKUP, no second import.
What You Get
A clean table in the Headcount tab, one row per employee:
- Employee ID — for cross-referencing
- Full name and email — from the employee record
- Department and job title — current values from BreatheHR
- Company join date — formatted consistently
- Current salary — joined from the salary records
The board table is ready on Tuesday afternoon. All 85 employees, all the fields the CFO asked for, no gaps.
If you want a tenure column, ask SheetXAI to add years of service calculated from the join date. Same prompt, one extra sentence.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Headcount tables for boards need more than a raw export. SheetXAI adds the analysis in the same prompt.
When salary basis is mixed and the committee needs like-for-like comparison
Some employees are paid hourly, some annually. Comparing raw numbers is misleading.
Pull all BreatheHR employees into the Headcount tab with salary amount and salary basis. Where basis is "Hourly," calculate annual equivalent assuming 37.5 hours per week, 52 weeks, and add it as "Annual Equivalent." Where basis is "Annual," copy the salary directly.
When the board wants headcount by pay band, not by department
The CFO wants employees bucketed into pay bands for the summary slide.
Pull all BreatheHR employees with current salary into the Headcount tab. Add a "Pay Band" column: "Under £30k," "£30k–£50k," "£50k–£75k," "Above £75k." Add a summary count at the top of each pay band group.
When you need headcount change versus last quarter
You have a Q1 snapshot in the Q1 tab of the same workbook. The board wants to see net change.
Pull all current BreatheHR employees into the Q2 tab. Compare employee IDs in Q2 against the Q1 tab. Write "New" next to employees who appear in Q2 but not Q1. Add a summary cell at the top showing how many employees left since Q1.
When the board needs a complete department summary alongside the full list
The CFO wants average salary and headcount by department above the full employee table.
Pull all BreatheHR employees with department and current salary into the Headcount tab. Build a department summary table at the top showing headcount, average salary, and average tenure per department. Then fill in the full employee list below the summary.
The pattern: instead of pulling a raw export and building formulas on top, you describe the workbook table you need and SheetXAI builds it.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open any headcount workbook, then ask it to pull the full BreatheHR employee directory. The BreatheHR integration is included in every SheetXAI plan. For related workflows, see how to generate a salary audit workbook from BreatheHR or the BreatheHR in Excel overview.