The Scenario
It's Monday morning at the start of a new quarter. You're a project manager at a 15-person agency, and the kickoff for Q2 means standing up 30 new client projects in Everhour — each one with its own sections and task lists. Your Excel workbook already has all of it: columns for client name, project name, section, and task, 30 rows deep.
The bad version:
- Open Everhour, click "New client," type the first client name, save. Repeat for each unique client across the workbook.
- For each project: click "New project," assign the client, type the name, set the billing config, save.
- For each section and task under each project: navigate into the project, add the section, add the tasks one at a time.
By the time you've clicked through the first five clients, you've already burned 45 minutes and you're on row 6 of 30. The workbook is right there. The data is ready. The only thing standing between you and a done project structure is a hundred individual UI interactions.
This quarter-start is also supposed to include a strategy call with each client by Wednesday.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent that lives inside your Excel workbook. It reads your data, understands the structure, and through its built-in Everhour integration it creates what you ask for — clients, projects, sections, tasks — without you navigating a single UI screen.
Read columns A–D in my Excel workbook (client name in A, project name in B, section in C, task in D) starting at row 2 and create all the Everhour clients, projects, sections, and tasks in one go. Deduplicate clients by name.
What You Get
- Each unique value in column A becomes an Everhour client, created once.
- Each project in column B is created under the right client with the section from column C.
- Each task in column D is created inside the right section of the right project.
- SheetXAI processes in dependency order — clients before projects, projects before sections, tasks last — so nothing fails on a missing parent.
- A summary is written back to the workbook: created / already existed / error, one row per item.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
The client names in column A have inconsistent formatting
Before creating anything in Everhour, normalize the client names in column A: trim whitespace, fix title case, and flag any cells that look like duplicates with different casing. Write the cleaned names back to column A.
Some rows are missing a section name
For any row in my workbook where column C is blank, default the section name to "General." Then create all the Everhour clients, projects, sections, and tasks using the workbook data with that fallback applied.
Projects should inherit budget hours from column E
Read columns A–E in my workbook (client name, project name, section, task, budget hours) and create all Everhour clients, projects, sections, and tasks. For each project, set the budget to the sum of budget hours across all its tasks from column E.
Clean, validate, and create in one shot
Check column A for blank client names and column B for blank project names — flag those rows in column F as "SKIP." For all remaining rows, deduplicate clients, normalize casing, and create the full Everhour structure: clients, projects, sections, and tasks. Write a status note back to column F for each row.
The pattern is to combine validation and creation in the same ask rather than cleaning the workbook first, running the import second, and debugging failures third.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open your quarter-start project workbook, then ask it to build the full Everhour structure from your data. If you track time against multiple client portfolios, also see how SheetXAI handles bulk-updating project budgets and the Everhour overview.