The Scenario
You are a team manager at a 60-person engineering department. Your busiest quarter starts in three weeks. Before Monday's sprint planning meeting, you need to know who has approved time off during that period — names, dates, hours — so you can plan coverage before people are already out.
The data is in Gusto. Getting it into an Excel workbook — filtered to your team, sorted by date — before Monday is the friction.
The slow version:
- Log into Gusto and navigate to Time Off
- Try to filter to pending requests for your team
- Export what you can — but the export does not filter by department
- Open the file in Excel and manually remove rows for people not on your team
- It is Sunday and you are cleaning a workbook instead of preparing for sprint planning.
The fast version is one prompt.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI pulls the time-off request data from Gusto and writes it into the workbook in the format you need — filtered, sorted, and ready for coverage planning.
Open the SheetXAI sidebar and type:
Export all Gusto time-off requests with status 'pending' into this Excel sheet: columns employee ID, employee name, policy name, start date, end date, hours requested. Sort by start date ascending.
SheetXAI calls Gusto's time-off API, pulls all pending requests, and writes them into the workbook sorted by start date.
What You Get
A pending time-off ledger with the columns you need for coverage planning:
- Employee ID — for any downstream system lookups
- Employee name — first and last
- Policy name — PTO, sick, holiday, or your company's plan names
- Start date — when the leave begins
- End date — when the leave ends
- Hours requested — the approved or pending hours
Sorted by start date. You see who is out first, which requests overlap with your critical delivery dates, and where you need to arrange coverage.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Time-off data for coverage planning has common complications.
When you need to flag requests that overlap with a specific project deadline
Your team has a hard delivery date on June 15. You want to know which requests overlap with the two weeks before.
Fetch all pending Gusto time-off requests. Write employee name, policy name, start date, end date, and hours to this workbook. Add an "Overlap" column — write "YES" for any request where dates fall between June 1 and June 15. Sort by start date.
When you only want requests for employees on your team
You have a list of your team members in the Team tab, column A.
Fetch all pending Gusto time-off requests. Filter to only the employees listed in the Team tab column A. Write employee name, policy name, start date, end date, and hours requested to this workbook. Sort by start date.
When hours requested are not filled in and you need to estimate coverage impact
Some requests show days, not hours.
Fetch all pending Gusto time-off requests. Write employee name, policy name, start date, end date, hours requested, and status to this workbook. For any request where hours is blank, calculate estimated hours based on 8 hours per weekday between start and end date and write that to the hours column with a note "(estimated)." Sort by start date.
When you need to combine pending requests with a project staffing plan to see coverage gaps
Your staffing plan is in the Staffing tab — milestones with required headcount and dates. You want to see how many team members are unavailable for each milestone.
Fetch all pending Gusto time-off requests for the employees in the Team tab column A. Cross-reference against the milestone dates in the Staffing tab column B and required headcount in column C. For each milestone, calculate how many team members are unavailable and write "Available: X / Required: Y" next to each milestone in the Staffing tab. Write the full time-off list to this workbook and the coverage analysis to the Coverage tab.
The pattern: instead of a separate export and a separate staffing analysis, you describe the combined coverage view and SheetXAI builds it.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open a blank workbook, then ask it to pull your pending Gusto time-off requests. The Gusto integration is included in every SheetXAI plan. For related workflows, see how to export the department org structure for planning or the Gusto in Excel overview.