The Scenario
Post-event review season. You're a project manager at a live events company and the CFO wants a budget vs. actual variance report for 30 completed projects before next Friday's leadership meeting.
You have the project IDs in a workbook. Rentman has the cost records linked to each one. Nobody has pulled them together before.
The bad version:
- Open each project in Rentman, navigate to the cost module, note the totals
- Realize cost categories aren't consistent — the same type of spend is labeled differently across projects depending on who created the cost entry
- Start a manual normalization mapping, which itself takes 45 minutes and still has gaps
The CFO presentation cannot be built on a spreadsheet that took a full day to assemble and is still inconsistent.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent inside your Excel workbook. It reads the project IDs in the workbook and fetches the associated cost records from Rentman for each one.
For each project ID in column A, fetch the associated costs from Rentman and write cost description, amount, and date into columns B, C, and D
What You Get
- One row per cost entry, project ID repeated in column A
- Column B: cost description as entered in Rentman
- Column C: cost amount as a numeric value
- Column D: cost date
- Projects with no cost records produce a single row noting that
- The flat structure lets you group or sum by project ID to get per-project totals
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
You need cost type or category to split by spend category in the analysis
For each project ID in column A, fetch Rentman costs and write cost description, cost type, amount, and date into columns B through E
Crew-related cost labels are inconsistent — normalize them to a single label
Pull costs for each project ID in column A, normalize any description containing Crew or Labor to Crew Labor, and write project ID, normalized description, and amount into columns A through C
You need a per-project total in Sheet2 alongside the budget figure from column F of Sheet1
Fetch all Rentman costs for the project IDs in column A, write the full detail into Sheet1 columns A through D, then in Sheet2 sum costs per project in column B with project IDs in column A, and pull the budget figure from Sheet1 column F using a match — add a variance column C as actual minus budget
Full variance report kill chain: fetch costs, calculate total actual, compare to budget, flag over-budget projects
Pull all Rentman costs for each project ID in column A, sum amounts per project, write project ID and total actual into columns A and B of Sheet2, bring in the budget from Sheet1 column F, calculate variance in column D, and flag any over-budget project as OVER BUDGET in column E — sort by variance descending
The CFO gets a variance table, not a verbal estimate.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open the project review workbook with your Rentman project IDs — then ask it to pull the cost records. If the review also needs invoice data alongside project costs, the invoice export spoke covers that separately.