The Scenario
You are a finance manager at a mid-size agency. The billing cycle closes tomorrow at noon. You have an Excel workbook with 400 timesheet rows collected manually from contractors over the past month: resource email, project code, date, and hours.
Every one of those rows needs to be in Hub Planner as a time entry before the billing run. You have been collecting them all month. Today is the day they have to get in.
The bad version of this morning:
- Filter the workbook to find rows not yet entered
- Open Hub Planner, navigate to the timesheet for resource one, project one
- Find the right date, type the hours, save, move to the next entry
- Lose your place on row 47 and cross-reference with the workbook again
- Discover three rows have project codes that do not exist in Hub Planner
- It is 3 PM. You have 280 rows left. The billing run starts in the morning.
The fast version is one prompt.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent inside your Excel workbook that reads every row and pushes it to Hub Planner as a time entry, flagging errors back to the workbook where you can fix them.
Open the SheetXAI sidebar and type:
For each row in this workbook, create a Hub Planner time entry using the resource email in column A to look up the resource ID, the project ID from column B, the date from column C, and the hours from column D converted to minutes. Write any error message to column F.
SheetXAI reads all 400 rows, resolves each email to a Hub Planner resource ID, converts hours to minutes, calls the time entry API for each row, and writes errors back to column F. Every successful row has nothing in column F; every failed row has an explanation.
What You Get
400 time entries pushed, with a legible error log back in the workbook:
- Successful rows — time entry created, column F blank
- Failed rows — error message in column F ("resource not found," "project code does not exist," "date out of range")
- Zero manual navigation — you did not open Hub Planner's timesheet UI once
The error column turns a batch job into a review task. Filter column F to non-blank, fix the underlying issues, and re-run just those rows. The billing run starts with complete data.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Manually collected contractor timesheets are never clean. SheetXAI handles the messiness and the import in the same prompt.
When hours are entered in inconsistent formats
Some rows say "7.5," some say "7:30" in time format, some say "7 hrs 30 min." Hub Planner expects whole minutes.
Normalize all values in column D to decimal hours, then convert to whole minutes (round to nearest minute). Create the Hub Planner time entry for each row using the converted minutes, and write any errors to column F.
When some project codes are blank
A handful of contractors left the project column empty because they were not sure which code to use.
For rows in this workbook where column B is blank, skip the time entry and write "Missing project code — needs manual review" to column F. For all other rows, create the time entry normally.
When the date column has entries from the wrong billing period
The workbook accumulated rows from the previous billing cycle that were already submitted.
Filter to rows where the date in column C falls within the current billing period (first to last day of the current month). Create Hub Planner time entries only for those rows. For rows outside the period, write "Outside billing period — skipped" to column F.
When resource emails do not match Hub Planner records
Some contractors changed their email and Hub Planner still has the old one. You have an Email Mapping tab with old and new emails side by side.
Before creating time entries, check each email in column A against the Email Mapping tab. If there is a match, use the corrected email instead. Then create Hub Planner time entries for all rows using the corrected emails where applicable, and write errors to column F.
The pattern: instead of cleaning the workbook before you import, you describe the issues in the prompt and SheetXAI handles them during the import. Four hundred rows, one prompt, one review pass.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open your timesheet collection workbook, then ask SheetXAI to push the rows to Hub Planner. The Hub Planner integration is included in every SheetXAI plan. For the other side of this workflow, see how to export approved time entries for invoicing or the Hub Planner in Excel overview.