The Scenario
You are an operations analyst on the finance team. The monthly budget review is Thursday morning. Your team ran 8 mail batches last month across three campaigns and the VP of Finance wants direct-mail costs reconciled against the quarterly budget tracker in Excel before the meeting.
PostGrid has all the billing data in postal statements. Getting it into the workbook is the problem.
The slow version:
- You log into PostGrid and click through each postal statement
- You copy statement ID, amount, date, and item count into the Excel workbook by hand
- You get through five of eight statements and then spend ten minutes sorting out which column goes where
- Thursday arrives and the VP asks about the two statements missing from the reconciliation. You do not have a good answer.
The fast version is one prompt.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI reads your PostGrid postal statements and writes them directly into the Excel workbook so the reconciliation is done before the meeting starts.
Open the SheetXAI sidebar and type:
Pull every PostGrid postal statement from last month and paste the data into the 'Direct Mail Costs' tab of this workbook. Write statement ID to column A, total amount to column B, created date to column C, and item count to column D. Then add a SUM formula at the bottom of column B.
SheetXAI calls PostGrid's postal statements endpoint, pulls all 8 statements, writes the data into the Direct Mail Costs tab, and adds the SUM. The VP can see the total before the meeting without anyone opening PostGrid.
What You Get
All 8 postal statements, written into the workbook:
- Statement ID — column A for traceability
- Total amount — column B for budget comparison
- Created date — column C for date-range filtering
- Item count — column D to sanity-check cost per piece
- SUM formula — bottom of column B for the total monthly direct-mail spend
The workbook is the reconciliation tool now. The VP compares the SUM in column B to the budget line and the meeting moves on. No PostGrid login needed, no separate report to generate.
Want a by-campaign breakdown? Add "after writing the statements, add a pivot summary below the data grouping by campaign" and SheetXAI creates the summary in the same prompt.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Finance reconciliations involve more than a straight pull. SheetXAI handles filtering, conversion, and formatting in the same prompt.
When you only want statements from a specific date window
The team ran test batches early in the month that should not count against the campaign budget.
Fetch all PostGrid postal statements. Filter to statements created between the 15th and last day of last month. Write statement ID, total amount, created date, and item count into columns A through D of the 'Direct Mail Costs' tab. Add a SUM at the bottom of column B.
When PostGrid returns amounts in cents and the budget tracker works in dollars
The API response uses cents. You need dollar values formatted consistently with the rest of the workbook.
Fetch all PostGrid postal statements from last month. Write statement ID into column A and created date into column C. Divide each total amount by 100 to convert from cents to dollars and write the result formatted as currency into column B. Write item count into column D. Add a SUM at the bottom of column B.
When the Direct Mail Costs tab already has data from previous months and you need to append without overwriting
The tab has a running ledger going back to January. You want last month's statements added below the existing data.
Fetch all PostGrid postal statements from last month. Find the first blank row in the 'Direct Mail Costs' tab below the existing data. Append each statement's ID into column A, total amount in dollars into column B, created date into column C, and item count into column D. Then update the SUM formula at the bottom of column B to include the new rows.
When date filtering, currency conversion, append logic, and a campaign pivot all need to happen before Thursday's meeting
Last month's statements span two calendar months, amounts are in cents, the tab has prior data, and the VP wants a by-campaign summary too.
Fetch PostGrid postal statements created between the 1st and last day of April. Divide amounts by 100 to convert to dollars. Append each statement's ID, dollar amount, date, and item count to the first blank row in the 'Direct Mail Costs' tab columns A through D without overwriting existing rows. Update the SUM formula at the bottom of column B. Then add a pivot summary below the data grouping April statements by the first word of the statement description as the campaign label, with total amounts per campaign.
The pattern: pull, filter, convert, append, and summarize all happen from one prompt. The reconciliation is ready before Wednesday is over.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open any budget or finance workbook, then ask it to pull PostGrid postal statements. The PostGrid integration is included in every SheetXAI plan. For a related workflow, see how to run a bulk check run from an AP workbook or the PostGrid in Excel overview.