The Problem With Getting Workbook Data In and Out of Timelink
You have an Excel workbook full of data — employee lists with person IDs, project codes, time entries you've exported for payroll review. You need it pushed into Timelink, or pulled back out, in a way that doesn't take an afternoon every time.
Timelink is good at recording work hours across both software and hardware time-tracking setups. But moving data between it and your workbook is more work than it should be. The usual flow is exporting a CSV from Timelink, opening it in Excel, doing your analysis, then re-entering the results back into Timelink by hand.
Below are the four common ways teams handle this. Only the last one scales.
Method 1: Manual Copy-Paste
The default. Export from Timelink as a CSV, open it in Excel, work through it. Or build your update list in the workbook and re-key each record back into Timelink.
When this works: one-off cleanup, fewer than 10 records, no recurring schedule.
When it breaks: anything recurring, anything that touches 20 or more records at once, anything where you need to act on the whole list rather than each row in isolation. One miskeyed person ID and the wrong record gets deleted. One session timeout and you start over.
Method 2: Power Automate
Wire up Power Automate to watch your Excel table. When a new row is added, the flow triggers an action in Timelink — creating a person, updating a project, or firing a deletion request. Or the reverse: when something changes in Timelink, write a row back to the workbook.
This works for event-driven moments: one new hire added, one record to create, one status change to log.
This fails for batch and analytical work: anything that operates on a list of 15 records at once, anything that needs to evaluate conditions before acting, anything where the schema changes. You also pay per task, and the costs add up fast once you chain steps.
Method 3: The Previous Generation — Connector Add-Ons
Until recently, the best option for repeatable workbook ↔ Timelink workflows was a category of add-ons that let you manually configure field mappings and saved templates. You picked your range, tagged your columns, saved a config, ran it.
That was a real step up from copy-paste. Output was consistent, configs were reusable, the team didn't have to redo formatting every run.
But you were still responsible for the template design, the field mapping, the schedule, the conditional logic about which rows to include, the handling of errors mid-run. The tool got the data through, but the thinking was still on you. And the moment your workbook structure changed, your config broke until someone went back in and fixed it.
This is the previous generation. It worked, but it asked a lot of the operator.
The Easy Way: Using SheetXAI in Excel
There is a different way entirely. SheetXAI is an AI agent that lives inside your Excel workbook. It reads the workbook, understands what you are looking at, and through its built-in Timelink integration it can push to or pull from Timelink for you. No template configuration, no automation glue, no re-entering data by hand. You just ask.
Example 1: Bulk-delete offboarded employee records using a column of person IDs
Delete all Timelink person records whose IDs are listed in column A of my "Offboarded" worksheet — do all 15 at once.
SheetXAI reads the column, fires the delete request for each ID in sequence, and reports back which records were removed and whether any failed.
Example 2: Summarize hours by project code and write results back to the workbook
Pull all time entries from Timelink for project codes listed in column B, sum the hours per code, and write the totals into column C.
The pattern: instead of exporting first and then summarizing, you ask for both in one prompt. SheetXAI handles the fetch, the aggregation, and the writeback inline.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open any Excel workbook with Timelink data, then ask it to do one of the tasks above. The Timelink integration is included in every SheetXAI plan.