The Scenario
You are an HR coordinator at a staffing firm. April's contractor cohort is twenty people. Their details — first name, last name, email, default hourly rate, timezone — are all in an Excel workbook. Timesheets open Monday morning.
It is Thursday. Every contractor needs a Harvest user account before they can log a single hour. Creating them manually means: log into Harvest, click Settings, click Team, click Invite Someone, fill in the name, email, and rate. Twenty times.
The bad version of Thursday afternoon:
- Open Harvest team settings, start the first invite
- Type the name, email, and rate, set the timezone, click invite
- Move to the next row, misread the rate for contractor seven and type $85 instead of $58
- Make it to fifteen before Harvest starts loading slowly
- Finish at 5:45, send a test time entry, discover two email addresses have typos
- The wrong contractors get the invite and Monday is a mess.
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 new hire table and creates every Harvest user in one pass, writing each returned ID back to the workbook.
Open the SheetXAI sidebar and type:
Update the billable rate for every user listed in my Rate Changes tab — column A is the Harvest user ID, column B is the new default hourly rate — and mark column C "Updated" when done.
Or for new hires:
Create a Harvest user for each row in my New Hires tab — columns are FirstName, LastName, Email, DefaultHourlyRate, Timezone — and write the new user ID back into column F for each row.
SheetXAI reads all twenty rows, creates each Harvest user with the right name, email, rate, and timezone, and writes the user ID into column F. When timesheets open Monday, every contractor is already in the system.
What You Get
Twenty Harvest user accounts created:
- Name and email — set exactly from the workbook, no manual typing
- Default hourly rate — written correctly from column D
- Timezone — set per contractor, not defaulted to your local zone
- User ID in column F — written back for your HR records
The user IDs in column F matter beyond Monday. When you need to pull time reports by contractor, assign them to projects, or update their rates at the end of the quarter, you already have the IDs in the workbook.
Need to assign each new user to a specific Harvest project immediately? Tell SheetXAI which column has the project IDs and it handles the assignments in the same prompt.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Contractor onboarding workbooks always have at least a few rows that need attention. SheetXAI handles the exceptions in the same prompt.
When some contractors are missing email addresses
The email column has blanks for three contractors who have not confirmed their addresses yet.
For each row where Email in column C is not blank, create a Harvest user. For rows where Email is blank, skip the creation and write "MISSING EMAIL" in column F. For all created rows, write the user ID into column F.
When hourly rates are formatted inconsistently
Some cells say "$75.00," some say "75," and one says "seventy-five." Harvest expects a numeric value.
Before creating users, normalize the DefaultHourlyRate in column D to a plain decimal number. Then create a Harvest user for each row with the normalized rate and write the user ID into column F.
When you need to update rates for existing contractors at the same time
Half the rows are new hires and half are existing contractors getting a rate change, distinguished by whether column F already has a Harvest user ID.
For rows where column F is empty, create a new Harvest user. For rows where column F already has a user ID, update that user's default hourly rate to the value in column D. Write "CREATED" or "UPDATED" in column G to indicate which action was taken.
When the cohort spans three countries with different currency settings
Column F has "USD," "GBP," or "EUR" and each contractor's rate should be set in the right currency for their Harvest user.
For each row, create a Harvest user using the name, email, and timezone from columns A through E. Set the default hourly rate from column D and the currency from column F. Write the Harvest user ID into column G. Flag in column H any currency code that Harvest does not recognize.
The pattern: the onboarding workbook is the single source of truth. SheetXAI reads it, sets up every user in Harvest correctly, and writes the IDs back so your HR records stay in sync without a single manual Harvest click.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open your contractor onboarding workbook, then ask it to create every Harvest user before timesheets open. The Harvest integration is included in every SheetXAI plan. See also how to bulk-create Harvest clients and projects from an Excel workbook or the Harvest in Excel overview.