The Scenario
You are an HR coordinator at a fast-growing startup. Twenty-five new hires start next Monday. Their details are in an Excel workbook — first name, last name, email, start date, department, and job title — entered by the recruiting team over the last two weeks.
Payroll runs on Friday. Every one of those 25 people needs to exist in Gusto before the payroll cutoff. It is Tuesday.
The slow version:
- Open Gusto
- Click "Add employee"
- Type in the first name, last name, email, start date, department, and title
- Save
- Click "Add employee" again
- Repeat twenty-five times
- Catch a typo on employee 17 only after payroll bounces
- Tuesday afternoon, gone.
The fast version is one prompt.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI reads your hiring workbook and creates every employee in Gusto without you touching the Gusto UI once.
Open the SheetXAI sidebar and type:
Bulk-create 25 employees in Gusto from this workbook — name, email, hire date, and manager name in columns A through D — write back the Gusto employee UUID to column E. Write "Created" or the error into column F for each row.
SheetXAI iterates through all 25 rows, calls Gusto's API for each, writes the UUID and status back into the workbook, and stops. You see exactly which ones succeeded and which ones need attention.
What You Get
Twenty-five Gusto employee records created, with a UUID and status column in the workbook:
- Gusto UUID in column E — ready for any system that needs the canonical employee ID
- "Created" in column F — confirmation the record exists in Gusto
- Error message in column F — if a row had a problem, the specific reason so you can fix it and re-run
You did not open the Gusto UI once. You did not type a name, click save, or tab between fields twenty-five times.
The UUID column also matters downstream — when your HRIS or expense system needs to link to Gusto records, the ID is already in the workbook.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Recruiting team data has its own formatting choices. SheetXAI handles the cleanup and creation in one pass.
When start dates are formatted inconsistently
Some rows have "2026-06-01," others have "June 1, 2026," and two have "6/1/26."
Before creating the Gusto employees, normalize all start dates in column C to ISO format (YYYY-MM-DD). Then create a Gusto employee for every row, write the UUID to column E, and write "Created" or the error to column F.
When some rows are missing a department
Seven rows have the department field blank because it has not been confirmed yet.
For rows where the department column is blank, skip creation and write "SKIPPED — department missing" into column F. For all other rows, create the Gusto employee, write the UUID to column E, and write "Created" or error to column F.
When you need to check for duplicates before creating
The recruiting team may have entered some people twice across different tracking sheets that were merged.
Before creating Gusto employees, check for duplicate emails in column B. Write "DUPLICATE" into column F for any duplicate row. Then create employees for all non-duplicate rows, write the UUID to column E, and write "Created" or error to column F.
When you also need manager names resolved to Gusto IDs
Your onboarding system requires the manager's Gusto employee ID, not their name.
For each new hire row in this workbook, look up the manager name in column D against the existing Gusto employee roster. Resolve the name to a Gusto employee ID. Write the manager's Gusto ID to column E. Then create the Gusto employee record for each new hire using columns A through D plus the resolved manager ID. Write "Created" or error to column F.
The pattern: the cleanup and the creation happen together. You do not fix dates in one step and create records in another.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open your next batch of new hire data in Excel, then ask it to create the employees in Gusto. The Gusto integration is included in every SheetXAI plan. For related workflows, see how to export the full employee roster for an HR audit or the Gusto in Excel overview.