The Scenario
You are an HR business partner. The annual pay review cycle starts in three weeks. The compensation committee wants a salary audit across all six departments before the review meetings, so they can identify pay-band gaps before anyone makes a decision.
You need every employee's name, department, salary, salary basis, and effective date in one Excel-ready table.
The slow version:
- Export the salary report from BreatheHR
- Open Excel, import it
- Realize the effective date is not in this export
- Go back and find where effective dates are in BreatheHR
- Export that separately
- Import into a second tab, write a VLOOKUP
- Discover twelve employees have multiple salary records from mid-year promotions
- Manually identify which record is current for each
- It is a week before the pay review cycle and you still have a workbook full of formulas instead of a clean table.
The fast version is one prompt.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI connects to BreatheHR and pulls the audit table you need, already resolved to one row per employee.
Open the SheetXAI sidebar and type:
Pull all BreatheHR employee salaries into the Salary Audit tab of this workbook. Include employee name, department, salary amount, salary basis, and effective date. Where an employee has multiple salary records, keep only the most recent. Sort by department, then by salary amount descending.
SheetXAI calls BreatheHR, resolves multiple salary records to the current one, and writes the sorted audit table into the Salary Audit tab. Three weeks before the review cycle, not the night before.
What You Get
A salary audit table ready for the compensation committee:
- Employee name — from the BreatheHR record
- Department — current assignment
- Salary amount — current salary, one value per employee
- Salary basis — annual, hourly, or daily
- Effective date — when the current salary came into force
Pay-band gaps are visible immediately. Sort by salary within each department and the outliers surface to the top.
The committee can mark up the workbook directly. When they are done, ask SheetXAI to push the approved changes back to BreatheHR as change requests.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Pay audit tables for review cycles need framing, not just raw numbers. SheetXAI adds the analysis inline.
When salary basis is mixed and the committee needs like-for-like comparison
Some employees are paid hourly, some annually. Comparing raw numbers across basis types misleads the committee.
Pull all BreatheHR employee salaries into the Salary Audit tab. Where salary 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. Sort by department, then by annual equivalent descending.
When the committee wants to see how long ago each salary was last updated
An effective date alone does not tell you if a salary has been frozen for three years.
Pull all BreatheHR employee salaries with effective date into the Salary Audit tab. Add a column showing months since the effective date, using today as the reference. Flag any employee whose salary has not been updated in more than 24 months.
When you need the audit grouped by pay band, not department
The CFO wants a pay-band breakdown across the company for the board pack.
Pull all BreatheHR employee salaries into the Salary Audit tab. Assign each employee to a pay band: "Under £30k," "£30k–£50k," "£50k–£75k," "Above £75k." Add a summary table at the top of the tab showing headcount per band and average salary per band.
When the committee wants a gap analysis against internal benchmarks
You have a Benchmarks tab with target salary ranges by job title. The audit should flag anyone below the lower bound.
Pull all BreatheHR employee salaries into the Salary Audit tab. Join each employee to the Benchmarks tab by job title. Add a "Gap" column showing how far the salary is below the lower bound of the benchmark range for that role. Flag any employee more than 10% below the lower bound.
The pattern: instead of pulling a raw export and building analysis separately, you describe the audit workbook you need and SheetXAI builds it.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open any compensation workbook, then ask it to pull the full BreatheHR salary export. The BreatheHR integration is included in every SheetXAI plan. For related workflows, see how to export the full employee directory to Excel or the BreatheHR in Excel overview.