The Scenario
New hire orientation wrapped up last Tuesday. Thirty employees start Monday. The IT provisioning coordinator has an Excel workbook with everything needed for each person's onboarding catalog order: catalog item sys_id in column A, laptop model preference in column B, office location in column C, start date in column D. Thirty Service Catalog orders need to be in ServiceNow before Friday so fulfillment can start processing over the weekend. Nobody has time to click through 30 catalog forms.
The bad version:
- Open ServiceNow Service Catalog, find the onboarding item, add it to the cart, fill in the variable fields for employee 1 — laptop model, location, start date — submit.
- Navigate back to the catalog, find the item again, fill in employee 2's variables, submit.
- Repeat 28 more times, pausing whenever a variable field label changes between catalog item versions.
Thirty catalog orders is not a workload. It is a process that was supposed to be automated by someone who left before they got to it.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent that lives inside your Excel workbook. It reads the catalog item sys_ids and variable values, submits each as a Service Catalog order in ServiceNow, and writes the returned request number back into the workbook.
For each row in this workbook, order the Service Catalog item with the sys_id in column A and the quantity in column B from ServiceNow and write the returned request number into column C
What You Get
- One Service Catalog order submitted per row
- The returned ServiceNow request number written into column C for each row
- Variable field values from columns B through D passed to each catalog item
- Rows that fail submission flagged in column C with the error reason
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
The variable field names in the workbook headers do not match the ServiceNow catalog item variable names
Your workbook has "Laptop Model" but the catalog item's variable is named "hardware_model."
Before submitting, map the column B value to the ServiceNow variable "hardware_model," column C to "office_location," and column D to "requested_start_date," then order the catalog item from column A for each row and write the request number into column E
Some rows have a blank start date because the new hire's start was postponed
Blank start dates will cause the catalog item to fail variable validation.
For each row in this workbook, skip rows where column D is blank and mark them "START DATE MISSING — HOLD" in column C, then submit catalog orders for all rows with a start date using the item sys_id from column A and variable values from columns B through D, writing the request number into column C
You need to submit two catalog items per employee — a laptop order and a software license
Each new hire needs both items ordered, but the workbook only has one catalog sys_id per row.
For each row, submit two catalog orders in ServiceNow: one for the item sys_id in column A (hardware) and one for the item sys_id in column B (software), using the employee name in column C as a reference on both orders, and write the two request numbers into columns D and E
Full kill chain: validate start dates, map variable names, submit both items, and confirm receipt
For each row, skip and flag any where column D is blank, map column B to the "hardware_model" variable and column C to "office_location" and column D to "requested_start_date," submit a catalog order for the hardware item sys_id in column A and a second order for the software item sys_id in column B, write both returned request numbers into columns E and F, and flag any submission failure in column G
All 30 new-hire onboarding orders are in ServiceNow before the provisioning team arrives Monday.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open the new-hire onboarding Excel workbook, then ask it to submit all 30 catalog orders to ServiceNow in one shot. For checking change schedule availability for related infrastructure work, return to the ServiceNow hub.