The Scenario
You are a compliance officer at a real estate brokerage. A regulatory inquiry has come in requesting documentation of all SMS communications sent to 25 specific contacts over the last 60 days. You have their Follow Up Boss person IDs in an Excel workbook, the Contacts tab, column A. Your reporting tool is Excel.
You have until 5 PM today to assemble the communication log.
The bad version:
- You open Follow Up Boss, search for person ID 1001, click into the contact record, click the Messages tab, scroll through 60 days of messages, copy each one
- You paste it into the Excel workbook row by row, manually fill in direction and timestamp
- You do this 25 times, across contacts with anywhere from 3 to 40 messages each
- By contact 10 you are copying timestamps wrong because Follow Up Boss shows them in local time and you need UTC
- At 4:50 PM you have 17 contacts documented and your eyes hurt
The fast version is one prompt.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent inside your Excel workbook that reads the person IDs from column A of the Contacts tab and pulls the full SMS history for each contact in one pass.
Open the SheetXAI sidebar and type:
For each person ID in column A of the Contacts tab, fetch all Follow Up Boss text messages sent or received in the last 60 days. Write message content, direction (inbound or outbound), sent timestamp, and person ID into new rows in this workbook. Sort by person ID, then by timestamp ascending.
SheetXAI iterates through the 25 person IDs, fetches the message history for each, and writes every message as a separate row in the workbook. Sorted by contact and by time. The whole log is ready before 3 PM.
What You Get
A complete SMS audit log assembled in one prompt:
- All messages — for each of the 25 contacts, every text from the last 60 days
- Direction — inbound or outbound for each message
- Timestamp — when the message was sent
- Person ID — in every row so each message is traceable to the right contact
- Sorted — by contact, then by time, so the thread is readable
Every message is in its own row, not collapsed into a single cell. That is the format regulators need to review communications sequentially.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Compliance audits rarely arrive as clean requests. Contacts are identified by email, date ranges shift, and the required format arrives late. SheetXAI adapts.
When you have emails instead of person IDs
The request came in with email addresses, not Follow Up Boss person IDs.
For each email in column A of the Contacts tab, look up the Follow Up Boss person ID by email address. Then fetch all text messages for that person from the last 60 days. Write person ID, message content, direction, and timestamp into new rows in this workbook, sorted by email then by timestamp.
When the date range is irregular
The inquiry covers a specific window: October 1 to November 30, not just "last 60 days."
For each person ID in column A of the Contacts tab, fetch all Follow Up Boss text messages sent or received between October 1 and November 30. Write message content, direction, timestamp, and person ID into this workbook. Sort by person ID, then by timestamp ascending.
When you need to flag messages that contain specific keywords
Regulatory review flagged a specific phrase and you need to surface any message that contains it.
For each person ID in column A of the Contacts tab, fetch all Follow Up Boss text messages from the last 60 days. Write all messages into this workbook. In a new column called "Flagged", write "Yes" if the message content contains the word "guarantee" or "guaranteed", and "No" otherwise. Sort flagged messages to the top.
When you need a contact-level summary plus the full transcript
The compliance report needs both a summary (total messages sent and received per contact) and the full message transcript.
For each person ID in column A of the Contacts tab, fetch all Follow Up Boss text messages from the last 60 days. First, create a summary table at the top of the workbook showing each person ID, total inbound count, and total outbound count. Then below the summary, write every individual message row with person ID, direction, content, and timestamp sorted by person ID and timestamp.
The pattern: instead of opening 25 contact records and copying messages one by one, you give SheetXAI the list and it does the retrieval for every contact in one pass.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open any workbook with Follow Up Boss person IDs or contact emails, then ask it to pull the SMS history. The Follow Up Boss integration is included in every SheetXAI plan. For related workflows, see how to log call records from a workbook or the Follow Up Boss in Excel overview.