The Scenario
You are a project manager at a UX consultancy. A six-month engagement just closed. The client wants a detailed expense breakdown before the final invoice — every receipt, every cost category, every month, grouped so they can see where the budget went.
All of it is in Harvest. Project ID 88432. Expenses logged across six months by four team members.
Pulling this manually means: open Harvest, go to the project, click Expenses, export the CSV, import it into Excel using Data > From Text/CSV, build a pivot table by category and month, add totals, and format it so it looks like a client-facing document. The pivot table alone takes twenty minutes if you have done this before. If you have not, add another thirty.
The bad version of Thursday:
- Export the Harvest expense CSV for project 88432
- Import it into Excel, discover the column order shifted from the last export
- Build a pivot table by category and month
- Format it so the client-facing version looks clean
- Realize the notes column has HTML-encoded characters from a Harvest formatting glitch
- Send it Friday morning hoping the client does not ask why three categories are missing.
The fast version is one prompt and the report is ready before lunch.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent inside your Excel workbook that calls Harvest for all project expenses and writes them into a clean, grouped tab without a CSV import.
Open the SheetXAI sidebar and type:
Fetch all expenses for Harvest project ID 88432 and write the date, category, amount, billable flag, notes, and submitter into columns A through F of my sheet. Then add a summary table below showing total spend per category and percentage of total.
SheetXAI queries Harvest's expense records for the project, writes every expense row into the tab, and builds the summary table at the bottom. The client-facing breakdown is ready without a pivot table.
What You Get
A populated expense tab for project 88432:
- Columns A through F — date, category, amount, billable flag, notes, submitter
- Summary table below — total spend per category and each category's percentage of total
- No CSV import formatting issues — the data comes through clean from the API
The percentage column in the summary is the thing clients actually read. When "Travel" is 38% of total project spend and "Software" is 6%, that context is immediately useful for the follow-on conversation about scope.
Need the breakdown by month as well as by category? Tell SheetXAI to add a second tab grouped by month and it adds it.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Project expense reports for clients always need more than the raw data dump. SheetXAI handles the analysis and formatting in the same prompt.
When the expense categories use internal codes the client will not recognize
Your Harvest categories are coded as "T&E," "SW," and "SUBCON" but the client expects full names.
Fetch all expenses for Harvest project 88432. Map the category codes to full names: T&E → Travel & Entertainment, SW → Software, SUBCON → Subcontractors. Write the full names into column B, then populate the rest of the columns and add the summary table grouped by full category name.
When expenses need to be grouped by both month and category
The client asked for a matrix view showing each category as a row and each month as a column.
Fetch all expenses for Harvest project 88432. After writing the raw entries into the main tab, add a second tab called Expense Matrix. In that tab, create a table where rows are expense categories and columns are the months the project ran. Each cell should show total spend for that category in that month.
When some expenses are marked non-billable and should be excluded from the client report
Not all expenses should appear on a client-facing report. Non-billable items are internal costs.
Fetch all expenses for Harvest project 88432 and write all of them into the main tab. Then add a summary table below that includes only rows where the billable flag is true. Show total billable spend per category and percentage of total billable spend.
When you need to build the full client report in one pass — raw data, summary, and a formatted cover section
The client wants a complete expense report document, not just a data table.
Fetch all expenses for Harvest project 88432. Write the raw entries into a tab called All Expenses with columns for date, category, amount, billable flag, notes, and submitter. Then create a second tab called Client Report that starts with a one-paragraph summary of total billable spend, the date range covered, and the top two expense categories by amount. Below the paragraph, add a summary table showing category, total spend, billable spend, and percentage of total — sorted by total spend descending.
The pattern: start with the raw Harvest pull and build the analysis on top in the same prompt. The client report is ready before you would have finished importing the CSV.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open a fresh Excel workbook, then ask it to pull all expenses for any Harvest project and build the category summary. The Harvest integration is included in every SheetXAI plan. See also how to log a batch of expense receipts into Harvest from an Excel workbook or the Harvest in Excel overview.