The Scenario
You are a program manager at a company running twelve product initiatives this quarter. The finance committee approved budgets for all twelve last Thursday. You have an Excel workbook on SharePoint with the planning data: project name, owner's Brex user ID, approved budget amount, and period type. Every approved initiative needs a Brex budget created before teams start spending. The first sprints kick off Monday.
The slow version:
- Open Brex admin, navigate to Budgets, click Create Budget
- Enter the project name, set the owner, enter the amount, choose the period
- Save, repeat twelve times
- Set the wrong owner on budget eight because "Johnson, M." and "Johnson, K." look the same in a fast-moving dropdown
- Fix budget eight, then double-check seven, nine, and ten.
The fast version is one prompt.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI reads the planning workbook and creates every Brex budget from the data in it.
Open the SheetXAI sidebar and type:
Create a Brex budget for every row in this workbook. Use the project name from column A as the budget name, the Brex user ID from column B as the budget owner, the approved amount from column C as the budget limit, and the period type from column D. Write "Created" or the error message into column E for each row.
SheetXAI reads all twelve rows, calls Brex's budget creation endpoint for each, and writes the result into column E. Twelve budgets, one status column.
What You Get
Column E with a status for every budget:
- "Created" — budget set up in Brex with the correct owner, amount, and period
- Error message — user not found, invalid period type, etc.
The owner IDs come from column B. No confused Johnsons.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Budget-planning workbooks always have at least one structural quirk. SheetXAI handles them inline.
When owner names are in the workbook instead of Brex user IDs
The finance committee wrote owner names, not IDs. You have an Employee Directory tab mapping names to IDs.
For each row, look up the owner name in column B against the Employee Directory tab to get the Brex user ID. Use the matched ID, project name from column A, amount from column C, and period from column D to create the budget. Write the resolved user ID and result into columns E and F.
When some projects share a budget pool
Three projects are sub-initiatives of a larger one and should share one Brex budget.
For rows where column E says "Shared," combine the amounts from those rows and create one Brex budget using the parent project name from column F and the combined amount as the limit. For all other rows, create individual budgets. Write the result into column G for each row.
When budget periods are inconsistent
Some rows have "Monthly," some "Quarterly," one row is blank.
Before creating budgets, validate the period type in column D. If blank, default to "Monthly." If the value is not recognized by Brex, write "Invalid period — skipped" into column E without creating the budget. For valid rows, create the budget and write "Created."
When you need to create budgets and add team members in one pass
Column E lists team members who should have spending access, as Brex user IDs separated by commas.
Create a Brex budget for each row using project name from column A, owner ID from column B, amount from column C, and period from column D. After creating each budget, add each user in column E as a budget member. Write the budget creation result and the member-add result into columns F and G.
The pattern: the planning workbook is the single source of truth. SheetXAI reads it once and builds every budget, including the edge cases that would have cost you a re-do in the Brex UI.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open the budget-planning workbook your finance committee produces after each approval cycle, then ask it to create all the Brex budgets in one go. The Brex integration is included in every SheetXAI plan. See also how to snapshot all Brex budgets with burn-rate analysis in Excel or the Brex in Excel overview.