The Scenario
You are a finance manager at a freelance agency. It is the third of the month and you have until EOD to reconcile May's billing against the invoices you sent clients.
Eighteen active projects. Six team members. Every time entry for May lives in Harvest. Your reconciliation workbook has client names in column A of the Billing tab, but the hours and billable totals are all blank, because pulling them from Harvest is a manual job you have been putting off since the first.
The bad version of this afternoon:
- Log into Harvest, run a time report filtered to May
- Download the CSV, import it into Excel, fix the column widths
- Match each row to the right project in your reconciliation tab by hand
- Discover three projects have slightly different names between Harvest and the workbook
- Fix the name mismatches, recalculate the totals, compare to the invoices
- It is 6 PM and you have two projects left.
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 project list and calls Harvest directly, so you never have to import a CSV.
Open the SheetXAI sidebar and type:
Fetch all Harvest time entries for May 2026 and populate this workbook with date, project name, task name, user name, hours, billable flag, and notes — one entry per row. Then add a summary block below showing total hours and total billable hours per project.
SheetXAI calls Harvest for every May entry across all projects, writes each row into the workbook, and adds the project-level summary at the bottom. You compare the summary block to your invoices and the reconciliation is done.
What You Get
A populated tab with every time entry for the month:
- Date, project name, task name — one entry per row
- User name and hours — so you can see who logged what
- Billable flag — so non-billable time is visible but separated
- Notes — for any entries that need explanation on the invoice
- Summary block — total hours and billable hours per project, calculated from the raw entries
The summary is grounded in the actual Harvest records, not in whatever the invoice said. If a team member logged eight hours as non-billable and you invoiced for those, the discrepancy shows up immediately.
Need to filter to one client before the summary? Tell SheetXAI which projects belong to that client and it recalculates.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Real billing reconciliations are never as clean as a single month of clean entries. SheetXAI handles the data issues and the reconciliation logic in the same prompt.
When project names in the workbook do not match Harvest
Your reconciliation workbook uses short client codes like "ACM-Branding" but Harvest has the full project name "Acme Corp — Brand Refresh 2026."
Fetch all May 2026 Harvest time entries. Match each entry's project name to the closest project code in column A using the client name as the key. If you cannot match a project, write it in column G as "UNMATCHED." Then populate hours and billable totals for every matched project into columns B and C.
When some team members log time under the wrong project
One team member has been logging hours to the retainer project instead of the milestone project for the same client.
Fetch all May 2026 time entries for projects whose names contain "Acme." List any entries logged by Sarah Kim under a project that is not "Acme Retainer" in a separate block at the bottom of the tab labeled "Possible Misallocations," showing date, project, hours, and task.
When you need utilization rates alongside billable hours
Finance wants to know not just total hours per project but what percentage of each team member's logged time was billable.
For each user in column A of the Team Utilization tab, fetch total hours and total billable hours logged in Harvest for May 2026. Write total hours into column B, billable hours into column C, and calculate the utilization rate (billable/total) in column D.
When the reconciliation covers three months and the data volume is large
The client asked for a full Q1 reconciliation, not just May.
Fetch all Harvest time entries for January, February, and March 2026. Populate this workbook with date, project, user, hours, and billable flag. Then add a summary section below grouped by project and month showing total billable hours and total hours for each combination. Highlight any project-month combination where billable hours exceeded the budgeted hours shown in the Budget tab.
The pattern: instead of importing a CSV and reformatting it, you describe what you need and SheetXAI handles the Harvest API calls, the matching, and the summary in one pass.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open your billing reconciliation workbook, then ask it to pull May's Harvest time entries across all projects. The Harvest integration is included in every SheetXAI plan. For related workflows, see how to bulk-create invoices from an Excel milestones sheet or the Harvest in Excel overview.