The Scenario
You are a personal finance coach. A client came to you because they consistently overspend on dining and subscriptions. They have budget targets set in MX. You are running a monthly check-in call in two hours and want to walk them through a live budget-versus-actual comparison in an Excel workbook they can keep.
You have the client's MX user GUID in cell A1. You have no budget data yet.
The bad version:
- Call the MX list-budgets endpoint for the client's user GUID to get all budget categories, amounts, and actuals.
- Paste category, budget, and actual columns into Excel by hand — three columns, however many category rows MX returns.
- Type a variance formula in column D and manually format cells where actual exceeds budget in red.
The client's call is in two hours. The budgets are straightforward. The problem is that MX returns numeric category codes instead of names in some response fields, so you need a separate lookup call to resolve them — and now you're debugging an API reference before you've even started the formatting.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent that runs inside your Excel workbook. It connects to MX Technologies, pulls all budget records with resolved category names, and calculates variance inline.
List all budgets for MX user USR-abc123 and write each budget's category name, budget amount, and actual spend amount to columns A, B, and C — in column D calculate variance as budget minus actual.
What You Get
- One row per budget category with a human-readable category name.
- Column A: category name.
- Column B: budget target.
- Column C: actual spend for the current period.
- Column D: variance (budget minus actual; negative means overspent).
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
You want overspent categories flagged with a label the client can read
List all budgets for MX user USR-abc123 and write category, budget, actual, and variance to columns A through D — in column E write "Over budget" if actual exceeds budget and "Within budget" otherwise.
Some categories returned zero as the budget amount and should be excluded
List all budgets for MX user USR-abc123 and write category, budget, actual, and variance to columns A through D — exclude any category where the budget amount is zero, and flag any category where actual is more than 20 percent above budget in column E.
You want to compare this month's actuals against last month's numbers stored in a separate worksheet
List all budgets for MX user USR-abc123 and write category, budget, and current actual to columns A, B, C — in column D look up last month's actual from the Prior Month worksheet using category name as the key and show the month-over-month change in spending.
You want the full coaching session view: budgets, actuals, variance, month-over-month trend, and the three categories most at risk highlighted in a summary
List all budgets for MX user USR-abc123 and write category, budget, actual, and variance to columns A through D — flag "Over", "At Risk" (within 10 percent of budget), or "On Track" in column E — look up last month's actual from the Prior Month worksheet in column F and show the change — in a Coaching Summary worksheet list the three categories with the largest overage.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open any Excel workbook with your client's MX user GUID, then ask it to pull all budget targets and actual spend and flag overspent categories before the coaching session. For tracking the savings goals that run alongside those budgets, see the savings goals progress article.