The Scenario
You are an operations coordinator at a subscription e-commerce brand. Yesterday a payment processing error caused 40 orders to charge incorrectly. Finance issued refunds this morning. Your job: cancel all 40 ShipEngine shipments before the end-of-day label run at 3 PM.
The shipment IDs are in an Excel workbook — Void Requests tab, column A — pulled from the order management system. You have two hours.
The bad version of this afternoon:
- Log into ShipEngine's dashboard
- Search for shipment ID one
- Click Cancel, confirm
- Repeat 39 more times
- Have the dashboard session time out at shipment 22
- Log back in and lose your place
- Finish at 3:20 PM. Labels for 8 shipments were purchased at 3:00.
The fast version is one prompt.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent inside your Excel workbook that reads the shipment IDs and cancels each one via the ShipEngine API, writing the result back for your records.
Open the SheetXAI sidebar and type:
Read all shipment IDs in my Void Requests Google Sheet and cancel each one in ShipEngine, then write the result status into column C.
SheetXAI reads the Void Requests tab, calls ShipEngine's cancel endpoint per row, and writes the outcome into column C. Forty cancellations done before 3 PM.
What You Get
Column C updated for all 40 rows:
- 'cancelled' — the shipment was voided in ShipEngine
- Error message — if ShipEngine could not cancel (already labelled, already voided, ID not found), the reason is written here
The failures are visible immediately. If three shipments were already labelled, column C tells you which three so you can decide whether to intercept them.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Cancellation lists from order systems have predictable gaps. SheetXAI handles them in the same prompt.
When the list has duplicate shipment IDs
The export ran twice and several IDs appear more than once.
Deduplicate the Void Requests tab by shipment ID in column A, keeping the first occurrence. Then cancel each unique shipment ID in ShipEngine and write 'cancelled' or the error message into column C.
When some rows should be skipped based on a hold flag
Column B has a hold status from the order system. Rows marked "ON HOLD" should not be cancelled yet.
Skip any rows in the Void Requests tab where column B contains 'ON HOLD'. Cancel all other shipment IDs in column A via ShipEngine and write the result into column C.
When you want to check each shipment's current status before cancelling
You are not sure if some shipments are already labelled.
For each shipment ID in column A of the Void Requests tab, first check the current ShipEngine status. If the shipment is cancellable, cancel it and write 'cancelled' into column C. If it is already labelled, write 'ALREADY LABELLED — cannot cancel' into column C. For any other status, write the status.
When you need to cancel, log the outcome, and write a summary for the ops director
The ops director wants a count before she leaves.
Cancel each ShipEngine shipment ID in column A of the Void Requests tab and write the result into column C. Then write a summary into cell E1: total cancelled, total already labelled and uncancellable, total errors, and the timestamp of when the cancellation run completed.
The pattern: cancel and summarize in one prompt so the ops director has an accurate count without a follow-up.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open any workbook with a list of ShipEngine shipment IDs to void, then ask it to cancel them and write the results back. The ShipEngine integration is included in every SheetXAI plan. For related workflows, see how to update shipment addresses before a label run or the ShipEngine in Excel overview.