The Scenario
You are a freelance consultant. October is done. Invoices go out today. Every task you completed last month is in Motion — name, project, duration, completion date. You need those in Excel to calculate billable hours per client and fill in the invoice template your accountant built.
You have been doing this every month for eight months. You have never made it faster than 90 minutes.
The bad version:
- Open Motion. Filter to Completed tasks. Export to CSV. The file opens in a new Excel instance, not your template.
- Copy the relevant columns into the template. Realize Motion exported duration in minutes and the template expects decimal hours. Add a helper column. Write the conversion formula. Apply it to 80 rows.
- Some tasks have no project assigned — they show as "None" in the project column. Decide how to handle them. Flag them manually.
- In the summary sheet, write SUMIF formulas to group hours by project. Double-check a few against the raw data. Find two mismatches. Debug for 20 minutes.
Freelance consulting is billed by the hour. Spending two hours un-billing your billing work is a specific kind of frustration.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent that lives inside your Excel workbook. It talks to Motion and writes the data exactly where you need it. Open the sidebar and ask.
List all Motion tasks with status Completed and write task name, project name, assignee, and completion date to columns A through D in Sheet1.
What You Get
- Every completed task from Motion written to Sheet1: task name, project name, assignee, completion date — one row per task.
- No extra columns you did not ask for.
- The output lands in the workbook you already have open — no CSV import step.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
You need billable hours grouped by client project
The invoice needs a summary, not just the raw list.
Fetch all completed Motion tasks from workspace WS-001, write them to Sheet1, then in Sheet2 group by project name and show total task count and sum of duration per project.
You only want October completions
April's completed tasks should not appear in October's invoice.
List all Motion tasks with status Completed where the completion date falls between 2026-10-01 and 2026-10-31. Write task name, project name, and completion date to columns A through C in Sheet1.
Duration is in minutes and you need decimal hours
Your invoice template expects decimal hours, not raw minutes.
Fetch all completed Motion tasks and write task name, project name, and duration in minutes to columns A through C in Sheet1. In column D, write a formula converting column C from minutes to decimal hours (column C divided by 60).
Full invoice prep in one pass — filter by month, convert duration, group by project, flag overages
The accountant wants it all in one workbook: October only, decimal hours, grouped by project, flagged if over 20 hours.
Fetch all Motion tasks completed between 2026-10-01 and 2026-10-31. Write task name, project name, and duration in minutes to columns A through C in Sheet1. Add column D with duration converted to decimal hours. In Sheet2, group by project name and sum decimal hours — flag in column C any project where total hours exceed 20.
One prompt replaces the four-step manual process.
Try It
Open your invoice workbook or a blank Excel file, then Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and ask it to pull your completed Motion tasks for the billing period. For related workflows, see how to export all Motion tasks for a status report or export projects for a portfolio dashboard.