The Scenario
You are the CFO of a forty-person startup. It is the last Thursday of the quarter. The board deck goes out tomorrow at 8 AM.
You have twenty active Brex budgets across engineering, sales, marketing, HR, travel, and fourteen project-specific ones. You need a one-page burn table in your Excel workbook: limit, spent, remaining, and percentage for each budget, with anything over 80% flagged.
The slow version of Thursday afternoon:
- Log into Brex, navigate to Budgets
- Click into each budget one by one
- Open the Budget Summary tab in Excel, type the budget names by hand
- Enter each limit and spent figure manually
- Add formula columns for remaining and percentage
- Scroll back to Brex to verify three numbers you are not sure about
- It is 7 PM and you have not written the commentary yet.
The fast version is one prompt.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI pulls every budget directly from Brex into your workbook so you do not have to click through twenty budget pages.
Open the SheetXAI sidebar and type:
Pull all active Brex budgets into the Budget Summary tab of this workbook. Include budget name, owner, period type, total limit, amount spent to date, and remaining balance. Add a Spend % column calculated as spent divided by limit. Flag any budget where Spend % is over 80 by writing "OVER 80%" in a Status column. Sort by Spend % descending.
SheetXAI retrieves all twenty budgets, writes the rows into the Budget Summary tab, calculates Spend %, adds the Status column, and sorts descending. Highest-risk budgets at the top.
What You Get
A clean burn-rate table sorted by risk in the Budget Summary tab:
- Budget name, Owner, Period type
- Total limit — the approved ceiling
- Amount spent — live from Brex right now
- Remaining balance — calculated
- Spend % — calculated
- Status — "OVER 80%" where applicable
The numbers are live from Brex, not from last week's export. Re-run the prompt before the board call for the freshest numbers.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Board-deck burn tables need more than raw numbers. SheetXAI layers in the analysis in the same prompt.
When you need a quarter-over-quarter comparison
The board wants to see whether burn rates have improved since last quarter.
Pull all active Brex budgets into the Budget Summary tab with the standard columns. Add a Q3 vs Q1 comparison: pull Q1 spend percentages from the Q1 Actuals tab in this workbook (matching on budget name) and show them side by side with the current Q3 percentages. Highlight budgets where the spend percentage got worse.
When only department budgets matter for the board view
The board sees departmental roll-ups, not the fourteen project budgets.
Pull all active Brex budgets into the Budget Summary tab. Filter to budgets where the owner appears in the Department Heads tab of this workbook. Show only those, sorted by spend percentage descending.
When you need a commentary column before the deck goes out
The CFO commentary column is always the last thing written.
Pull all active Brex budgets into the Budget Summary tab with the standard columns. Add a Commentary column. For each budget over 80% spent, write a one-sentence likely-cause explanation based on the budget name and category. For budgets under 50% spent, write "On track."
When the board deck covers two Brex entities
Your company has a US entity and a European subsidiary, each with its own Brex account.
Pull active budgets from both Brex entities into the Budget Summary tab. Add an Entity column showing which account each budget belongs to. Add a combined total row at the bottom for aggregate limit, spent, and remaining across both entities. Flag any budget over 80% spent in a Status column.
The pattern: one prompt for the snapshot, same prompt extended for the analysis layer.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open your board-prep workbook before the next quarterly review, then ask it to pull all Brex budgets with burn-rate analysis into the Budget Summary tab. The Brex integration is included in every SheetXAI plan. See also how to export Brex transactions for month-end reconciliation in Excel or the Brex in Excel overview.