How to Connect Rentman to Excel (4 Methods Compared)

The Problem With Getting Data In and Out of Rentman

You have an Excel workbook full of event production data — project schedules, equipment registers, crew payroll summaries, invoice line items. And you have Rentman, where the actual source records live. The gap between them is where time disappears.

Rentman handles quoting, crew scheduling, equipment tracking, and subrental management for production and AV rental companies. Getting that data into Excel for analysis or finance reporting is a separate problem Rentman does not solve for you. The default path is a CSV export, a manual import, a column cleanup, and a reminder to do it again next month when the numbers are stale.

Below are four ways to close that gap. Only the last one stays out of your way.

Method 1: Manual Export and Import

Open Rentman, navigate to the right module, export the CSV. Open Excel, import the file, clean the date formats, fix the column headers, filter out the rows you don't need, and paste the results into the workbook.

CSV exports are more common than raw copy-paste in an Excel context, and they feel cleaner — until the third time you do it for the same report. Rentman's data updates constantly: project statuses change, crew gets reassigned, new equipment gets added to a subrental. Every refresh of your workbook starts the import sequence from zero. For anyone who touches this report more than twice a month, the time cost of that cycle is not nothing.

Method 2: Power Automate

Power Automate has Rentman connector support. You can define a flow that triggers on a schedule or an event, pulls records from Rentman, and writes rows into an Excel workbook in OneDrive or SharePoint.

A few questions before you go further — do you know how to build a Power Automate flow from scratch? Do you know what a REST connector configuration looks like, or how to handle paginated API responses? Do you know what to do when a flow run fails silently and your workbook stops updating? If any of that is unfamiliar territory, you're probably better off with Method 4.

Still here? The setup involves configuring a Rentman HTTP connection, defining the right endpoint and query parameters, mapping the JSON response fields to Excel columns, and handling Rentman's relational data model — which means separate calls for projects, equipment, crew, and invoices, with joins that Power Automate doesn't perform natively.

The flow can work. What it can't do is pull a joined, filtered view across multiple Rentman modules in a single operation. You probably just need to see all equipment booked across this month's confirmed projects. You probably have no idea how to build a multi-step flow that joins project and equipment endpoints, and you shouldn't have to build one just to see that table. So you either learn Power Automate, or you hand it to IT — and now there's a ticket open and you're waiting.

Each additional step in the flow is another failure surface. And the moment you need to filter or summarize across the full dataset, you've pushed past what the automation can handle natively.

Method 3: The Previous Generation — Connector Add-Ons

Until recently, the most practical option for teams that needed repeatable Rentman-to-Excel workflows was a category of add-ons that let you define saved column mappings and run them on demand. You configured the endpoint once, saved the template, and ran it when you needed a refresh.

It was a real improvement over manual imports. The column structure held across runs. The team didn't have to re-learn the field mapping every month. Someone without API knowledge could trigger the refresh.

But the template was yours to design, yours to maintain, and yours to fix the moment your workbook structure or Rentman schema changed. The tool delivered the data. Every decision about what to pull and how to shape it was still on you. A solid workflow for its era — but it never stopped requiring an operator behind it.

The Easy Way: Using SheetXAI in Excel

There is a better way to do this. SheetXAI is an AI agent that lives inside your Excel workbook. It reads the workbook, understands what you're trying to accomplish, and through its built-in Rentman integration it can fetch records and write them back into the right cells — without any template configuration, flow setup, or field mapping on your part. You describe what you need.

Example 1: Invoice export for quarterly accounts close

Get all Rentman invoices from January through March 2025 and write invoice number, contact name, net amount, and payment status into columns A through D

Every invoice in that date range arrives in the workbook, correctly ordered, ready for the accountant.

Example 2: Equipment demand across upcoming projects

Pull all project equipment from Rentman for the project IDs in column A and list item name, quantity, and planned period next to each project

The pattern: instead of a CSV import followed by a VLOOKUP exercise, you describe the join you need and SheetXAI handles the API calls, the data assembly, and the writeback.

Try It

Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open any Excel workbook where you've been pasting Rentman exports, then ask it to pull the data directly. The Rentman integration is included in every SheetXAI plan.