The Scenario
You're the product manager at a multi-category retailer. Your team just finished loading 400 new SKUs into an Excel workbook — product names in column A, descriptions in column B, product type in column C, and column D is empty. The tax engine your company uses requires a TaxJar product tax code in column D before any of these SKUs can be processed through checkout.
Nobody on the team knows the right product tax codes off the top of their head. TaxJar has a full category list, but accessing it means either browsing a web page or calling the API — neither of which is fast when you have 400 rows waiting.
The bad version:
- Open TaxJar's product category documentation, search for each product type, find the matching code, copy it, switch back to the workbook, paste it into column D. Repeat across 400 rows with 12 distinct product types.
- Realize halfway through that some product types map to multiple TaxJar categories and you've been guessing which one applies.
- Get a message from engineering asking when column D will be ready — the tax engine integration goes into QA tomorrow morning.
400 rows with 12 product types should take ten minutes. It's taking two hours because the lookup has to happen manually, one product type at a time, in a separate browser tab.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent that lives inside your Excel workbook. It reads the product data in your workbook and through its built-in TaxJar integration it fetches the full category list and uses it to populate the right code for each row.
Open the SheetXAI sidebar and type:
Fetch all available TaxJar product tax categories into this Excel sheet so I can use the codes as a reference lookup for my 400 SKUs
What You Get
- The full TaxJar product category list written into the workbook: category name, product tax code, and description.
- You can now use this as a lookup reference to populate column D across your SKU catalog.
- The list reflects TaxJar's current categories — no manual maintenance required.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
You want the category list used to populate column D automatically
Rather than building the lookup yourself, ask SheetXAI to do both steps.
Fetch all TaxJar product tax categories, then for each row in the Products worksheet use the product type in column C to find the best-matching TaxJar category and write the product tax code to column D and the category name to column E
Some product types are ambiguous and need to be flagged for human review
Your catalog has a category called "accessories" that could map to several TaxJar codes depending on context.
Fetch TaxJar product tax categories and match each product in column C to the most appropriate code — write the code to column D, the category name to column E, and "REVIEW NEEDED" to column F for any product type where more than one category plausibly applies
You only need codes for specific product types
Your 400 SKUs span only 8 distinct product types. You want the category list filtered to just those.
Fetch all TaxJar product tax categories and write only the rows that are relevant to these product types to this workbook: clothing, footwear, food supplements, electronics, software, books, cleaning supplies, personal care — include category name, code, and description
The kill chain: fetch categories, match, fill column D, and flag anything that didn't match
Fetch all TaxJar product tax categories, then for each row in the SKUs worksheet match the product type in column C to the closest TaxJar category and write the code to column D and category name to column E — for any row where no confident match exists write "UNMATCHED" in column F so the team can assign codes manually
One prompt covers the category fetch, the matching logic, the writeback, and the exception flagging.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open any Excel workbook with a product catalog — ask it to fetch TaxJar's category list and populate the tax code column across your SKUs. You can also explore calculating order-level tax or looking up rates by ZIP for the locations those products ship to.