How to Connect Timely to Excel (4 Methods Compared)

The Problem With Getting Workbook Data In and Out of Timely

You have an Excel workbook full of data — a table of client names ready to onboard, 200 rows of historical time logs, a list of project IDs flagged for archiving. Timely needs all of it. The default path is to open Timely, navigate to the right section, and start clicking through one record at a time while your workbook sits open in the other monitor for reference.

Timely is excellent at automatic time capture — it tracks activity across apps and calendars and produces usable timesheets without manual input. But moving bulk data into or out of it still runs through the UI, and the UI was designed for one record at a time. The typical flow is: export a CSV from Timely, open it in Excel, remap the columns to match your workbook structure, do your analysis, and then manually rekey anything that needs to go back.

Below are the four ways teams handle this. Only the last one scales to the size of the problem.

Method 1: Manual CSV Export and Paste

Open Timely, navigate to the section you need — projects, clients, time entries — export a CSV, open it in Excel, and spend time reformatting columns to match your workbook. Going the other direction is more painful: if you have 35 clients to create in Timely, you click "New client," type the name, pick a color, save, and repeat.

For small one-time tasks this is survivable. For anything recurring or above 20 rows, the mechanical repetition starts extracting a real cost. If you're migrating 200 historical time entries into a new Timely account, entering each one through the UI is a half-day project that should take ten minutes.

The toll isn't just time — it's attention. Every manual entry is a chance to fat-finger a project ID or skip a row and not realize it until the billing report looks wrong.

Method 2: Power Automate

Power Automate has a Timely connector. You can build a flow that triggers on a table change in Excel, calls the Timely API, and writes results back to a worksheet.

Quick check before you go further: are you comfortable with connectors, triggers, action steps, and dynamic content in Power Automate? Do you know how to handle authentication tokens and field mapping? If those terms feel vague, skip to Method 3 or 4 — this path requires a builder, and if that's not you, you're better off spending that time elsewhere.

If you're still reading: the setup works. You authenticate the Timely connector, pick the right action, map each Excel column to the matching Timely field, and test. The flow runs. The problem is the structural ceiling.

Power Automate fires one row at a time.

Back-filling 200 time entries means 200 flow runs, 200 API calls, and a run history that becomes painful to inspect when one row fails mid-batch and you're not sure which ones made it through.

You probably just need the entries created, and you have no idea how to wire up a Power Automate flow from scratch. So you push it to your IT contact or the person on the team who builds these things, and now you're waiting while they fit it into their queue.

Every conditional step — filter this column, skip rows where status is empty, convert date format — adds cost and complexity that compounds fast.

Method 3: The Previous Generation — Connector Add-Ons

Until recently, the standard option for repeatable Excel-to-Timely workflows was a category of add-ons that let you configure column mappings and save them as reusable templates. You defined your range, tagged your fields, saved the config, and ran it when you needed it.

That was a genuine step up from doing everything by hand. Templates were reusable, output was consistent, and your team didn't have to redo the formatting each run.

But you were still responsible for designing the template, deciding which rows qualified, handling column renames when your workbook structure changed, and repairing the config every time Timely updated its API fields. The add-on got the data through — the intelligence about what to include, how to filter it, and what to do with edge cases was still entirely yours to manage. And the moment someone renamed a tab or added a column, the config broke until someone fixed it.

This is the previous generation. It worked. It asked a lot.

The Easy Way: Using SheetXAI in Excel

There is a different approach entirely. SheetXAI is an AI agent that lives inside your Excel workbook. It reads your workbook, understands what you're looking at, and through its built-in Timely integration it can push to or pull from Timely for you. No template configuration, no automation flow, no reformatting by hand. You describe what you want and it happens.

Example 1: Create all clients from your table in one shot

For each row in my Excel table on the Clients sheet, create a new client in Timely using the name in column A and the color code in column B

Timely receives a create-client call for each row. Results land in column C — one confirmation or error per row so you can see exactly what happened.

Example 2: Export Q1 time entries for billing

Pull every time entry from my Timely account for Q1 2025 into my Billing worksheet, one row per event with date, project name, user, and duration

The entries land in your workbook with no CSV download, no column remapping, no copy-paste. You ask once.

Try It

Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open any Excel workbook with client tables, project IDs, or time entry data, then ask it to sync with Timely. The Timely integration is included in every SheetXAI plan.