The Scenario
You are a startup founder. Your budget planning session is on Friday and your ops lead has asked you to come with a clear picture of Q1 spending by category.
You have 80-odd expense entries across Q1 in FreeAgent. You need them in an Excel workbook grouped by category so you can see where money actually went before deciding where to cut or invest for Q2.
The slow version:
- Export Q1 expenses from FreeAgent as CSV
- Open in Excel, realize the rows are in date order, not grouped by category
- Add a SUMIF formula, hit an inconsistent category naming issue
- Fix the inconsistencies manually
- Build a summary table by hand below the data
- It is Thursday evening and the session is fourteen hours away.
The fast version is one prompt.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent inside your Excel workbook that pulls FreeAgent expenses and builds the category summary in one pass.
Open the SheetXAI sidebar and type:
List all FreeAgent expenses for Q1 2025 and write date, description, amount, and category into columns A through D. After the last row, add a blank divider and a summary section showing total amount spent per category, sorted by total descending.
SheetXAI pulls all Q1 expenses, writes the detail rows, and builds the category summary sorted by spend. You see immediately which categories are largest.
What You Get
An expense analysis workbook with:
- Columns A–D — date, description, amount, category for each expense row
- Summary section below — total per category, sorted largest to smallest
- All Q1 data — no manual filtering or date adjustment
The summary is sorted by spend, so the biggest cost categories are at the top. You walk into the budget session already knowing where the money went.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Expense exports have real-world messiness a CSV download never solves.
When category names are inconsistent
Some expenses are "Software" and some are "SaaS Tools" — same thing, different labels.
Pull all Q1 FreeAgent expenses into columns A through D. Before building the summary, normalize category names: treat 'Software', 'SaaS Tools', and 'Software Subscriptions' as the same category standardized to 'Software'. Then build the per-category total summary below the data.
When you want percentage of total alongside amounts
Your ops lead wants each category as a percentage of total Q1 spend.
List all Q1 FreeAgent expenses into columns A through D. In the summary section, show category name, total amount, and percentage of total spend per category. Sort by total amount descending.
When reimbursable expenses should be excluded
Reimbursable rows are employee expenses — not company spend — and should not be in the budget breakdown.
Pull all Q1 FreeAgent expenses where the expense is not marked as reimbursable. Write date, description, amount, and category to columns A through D. Build the category summary below.
When you want the full budget prep workbook: pull, normalize, summarize, and compare against Q2 targets
You have Q2 budget targets in a separate tab and want to compare actual Q1 spend against the Q2 plan for each category.
Pull all Q1 FreeAgent expenses into columns A through D. Normalize any inconsistent category names. Build a summary section showing total Q1 spend per category in column B. In column C, pull the Q2 budget target for each category from the Budget tab column B, matching by category name. In column D, calculate the variance and write 'OVER TARGET' if negative or 'UNDER TARGET' if positive.
The pattern: instead of exporting, normalizing, and summarizing in three separate passes, you describe the final analysis in one prompt.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open an Excel workbook, then ask it to pull your Q1 FreeAgent expenses with a category breakdown. The FreeAgent integration is included in every SheetXAI plan. See also how to export FreeAgent bank transactions for expense review or the FreeAgent in Excel overview.