The Scenario
You're a project manager at a software consultancy. Six active projects. Monthly budget reviews with the ops director. The process is always the same: pull last month's Clockify summary, copy the hours column into your tracking workbook, compare against the budgeted hours in column C, see which projects are over.
This time, two of the six projects changed names in Clockify mid-month because the client changed their preferred abbreviation. So now the summary export has entries that don't match what's in your budget column, and you're doing a find-and-replace before the numbers even make it into the workbook.
The bad version:
- Export the Clockify summary CSV, open it in Excel, reformat the date headers.
- Discover two project names changed; manually find the old entries and merge them.
- Paste hours into column B, write the overrun formula in column D, reformat the cells.
You're supposed to be doing the analysis — the "which projects are trending over and why" part. The part where you look at the data and draw conclusions. Instead you're doing the data prep, which is its own separate job that nobody budgeted for.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent inside your Excel workbook. It reads the workbook, sees your budget column, connects to Clockify, and pulls the summary report — matching project names and calculating overruns in one pass.
Generate a Clockify summary report grouped by project for this month. Write project name and total hours into columns A and B, compare against the budgeted hours in column C, and highlight any row in red where actual hours exceed budget by more than 10%.
What You Get
- One row per active Clockify project in the current month.
- Project name in column A, total tracked hours in column B.
- Column D populated with the variance (actual minus budget) for each project.
- Any row where actual hours exceed budget by more than 10% highlighted in red.
- Projects with zero tracked hours still appear, with 0 in column B, so you can see which projects went untouched.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Two project names changed in Clockify mid-month
The old name is in your budget column; the new name is what Clockify's report returns.
Pull the Clockify summary report for this month. For each project in the report, match it to the closest name in column A of this workbook — even if the name has changed slightly. Write total hours into column B and flag any row where the match was uncertain.
I want to compare against two budget columns — original and revised
Your ops director revised budgets for three projects halfway through the month. You have both in columns C and D.
Pull this month's Clockify summary, write total hours into column E, compare against the original budget in column C and the revised budget in column D, and write the variance for each into columns F and G respectively.
I need the report scoped to a subset of projects only
You track six projects in Clockify but only three are client-facing; the rest are internal. The budget review only covers client-facing work.
Pull the Clockify summary for this month, but only include projects listed in the "Client Projects" worksheet column A. Write name and hours into columns A and B, compare against column C, highlight overruns in red.
Pull the report, reconcile names, check overruns, and add a note column in one shot
Pull this month's Clockify summary report. Match project names to column A (use fuzzy matching for near-misses). Write total hours into column B. Compare against the budget in column C and write the overrun percentage into column D. For any project more than 20% over budget, write "Review required" into column E.
Each of those steps would normally be a separate pass. Putting them in one prompt means you get a finished, annotated budget comparison — not a halfway-there table you still have to touch.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open the Excel workbook where you track project budgets, then ask it to pull this month's Clockify summary and populate the actuals. Also see: Pull a Clockify Detailed Report Into an Excel workbook for Client Billing and the Clockify integration overview.