The Scenario
You are an IT admin at a creative agency. The agency just signed up for Hub Planner. You have an Excel workbook with 12 booking categories (names and hex colors) and 8 billing rates (label, currency, hourly rate) that need to be created before any team member can start logging time.
None of it exists in Hub Planner yet. It is 9 AM on the day the team is supposed to start using it.
The bad version of this morning:
- Open Hub Planner, navigate to Settings, find Booking Categories
- Click "Add Category," type the name, pick the hex color from the workbook, save
- Repeat 11 more times
- Navigate to Billing Rates, click "Add Rate," type the label, set the currency, type the hourly rate
- Repeat 7 more times
- Miss the hex color on category 9 because you misread it in the workbook
- The team is waiting. You spend 90 minutes on data entry that takes one prompt.
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 configuration workbook and creates the booking categories and billing rates in Hub Planner, writing the new IDs back for your records.
Open the SheetXAI sidebar and type:
Create Hub Planner booking categories for every row in the Categories tab using the category name from column A and hex color from column B. Write the new category ID to column C. Then create Hub Planner billing rates for every row in the Rates tab using the label from column A, currency from column B, and hourly rate from column C. Write the new rate ID to column D.
SheetXAI processes both tabs in sequence, calls Hub Planner's configuration APIs, and writes the resulting IDs back to the workbook. You have a complete configuration record in the same workbook you started with.
What You Get
A fully configured Hub Planner account, with IDs written back:
- Categories tab, column C — the Hub Planner ID for every booking category created
- Rates tab, column D — the Hub Planner ID for every billing rate created
The IDs matter for what comes next. When you create bookings or time entries in a later prompt, you reference these category and rate IDs directly from the workbook instead of looking them up in Hub Planner every time.
The team can start logging time as soon as the prompt finishes.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Configuration workbooks collected from finance and operations are often inconsistently formatted. SheetXAI handles it before it touches the API.
When hex colors are missing the leading hash
Some rows have "#3A86FF," others have "3A86FF" without the hash. Hub Planner expects the hash.
Before creating booking categories, ensure all values in column B of the Categories tab start with "#." Add the hash if it is missing. Then create one booking category per row and write the category ID to column C.
When billing rates have currency symbols in the rate column
Finance formatted the rate column as "$150.00" instead of plain "150."
Strip currency symbols and whitespace from column C in the Rates tab before creating billing rates. Then create one billing rate per row using the cleaned value and write the rate ID to column D.
When some categories have duplicate names
The workbook was assembled from multiple teams and two categories ended up with the same name.
Before creating booking categories, check for duplicate values in column A of the Categories tab. For any duplicate, append a number to make it unique (e.g., "Design" → "Design 2"). Then create one category per row and write the category ID to column C.
When the whole configuration needs to be replicated across two Hub Planner accounts
The agency has a production account and a staging account. You need the same categories and rates in both.
Create Hub Planner booking categories for every row in the Categories tab and billing rates for every row in the Rates tab. Write the production IDs to the existing ID columns. Then repeat the operations against the staging account credentials and write the staging IDs to separate columns (D and E in each tab).
The pattern: describe the configuration you need, including any cleanup, and SheetXAI handles the creation in sequence with results written back where you can verify them.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open your Hub Planner configuration workbook, then ask SheetXAI to create the categories and billing rates. The Hub Planner integration is included in every SheetXAI plan. For related workflows, see how to bulk-create resources from an HR roster or the Hub Planner in Excel overview.