The Scenario
You coordinate a 12-person team across four clients, and your master tracker in Excel is the source of truth for everything downstream — payroll, billing, cost center allocation. Every row represents a project. Column A has the project name. Column B is supposed to have the TimeCamp task_id so payroll can match hours to the right cost center.
Column B is mostly empty.
The person who set up the master tracker left the company six weeks ago. You've been manually looking up task_ids in TimeCamp one project at a time — opening the project, copying the ID, pasting it back into the workbook. You've done it for eight projects. There are 23 more to go.
The bad version:
- Open TimeCamp, search for each project name in the list, click through to the project detail, find the task_id field, copy it
- Switch back to Excel, find the right row, paste the value into column B
- Move to the next project and repeat — 23 more times, with no guarantee your search results are returning the right match when two client projects have similar names
This is the kind of work that makes you feel like you're doing data entry for a living. You're not. You coordinate a team. This is not what coordination looks like.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent that lives inside your Excel workbook. It reads your existing data, looks up each project name against TimeCamp's API, and writes the matching task_id directly into the column you specify — no tab-switching, no search, no paste.
Look up each project name in column A against TimeCamp and write the matching task_id into column B — leave column B blank if no match is found
What You Get
- Each row in column A is matched against TimeCamp's project list by name
- The corresponding task_id is written into column B for every row that has a match
- Rows where the project name doesn't match anything in TimeCamp are left blank, not overwritten with a guess
- You can see immediately which names need to be corrected before payroll runs
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Project names in the workbook don't exactly match what's in TimeCamp
Look up each name in column A against TimeCamp projects, write the task_id into column B if there's an exact match, and write "No match — check spelling" if the name doesn't resolve
You only want to fill in task_ids for active projects
For every row in this workbook where column C says "active", look up the project name in column A against TimeCamp and write the matching task_id into column B
You need to add budget and user count alongside the task_id
Look up each project name in column A against TimeCamp, write the task_id into column B, the project budget into column C, and the number of assigned users into column D
Full enrichment-and-flag pass before payroll runs
Look up every project in column A against TimeCamp, write task_id into column B, budget into column C, and assigned users into column D — then add a column E that says "Ready" if task_id is populated and "Fix" if it isn't, and sort the workbook so all "Fix" rows are at the top
Everything you need before the payroll handoff — in one prompt.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open your project master tracker in Excel, then ask it to fill in the TimeCamp task_ids for every project name in column A. It reads your workbook, looks up each one, and writes back the values your payroll team is waiting for.
Also useful: Pull Your Full TimeCamp Project List Into an Excel Workbook and the TimeCamp + Excel overview.