The Scenario
You are three weeks into a Timely migration for a consulting firm that tracked time manually for two years. The spreadsheet log has 200 rows: project ID, user, date, start time, end time, and a note column. Every one of those rows needs to exist as a Timely time entry before the firm can go live. The person who handed you this job said "it should only take a few hours."
The bad version:
- Open Timely, click "Log time," select the project from the dropdown, set the date, enter the start and end time, type the note, save
- Switch back to the workbook, find your place in row 2, switch back to Timely, repeat
- Reach row 40 and realize that at this pace, the 200-row migration will take the rest of the day
Nobody hired you to be a data entry operator. The value of your time on this project is in verifying the data is correct, not in clicking through 200 form submissions.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent that lives inside your Excel workbook. It reads your migration log and through its built-in Timely integration it can create all 200 time entries in a single operation — no UI, no clicking, no switching worksheets.
Create Timely time entries in bulk from my Migration Log worksheet — use project ID from column A, user from column B, date from column C, start time from column D, end time from column E, and note from column F for all 200 rows
What You Get
- Timely receives a create-event call for each row in the migration log
- Column G fills with the result: the new event ID if successful, an error message if something failed (invalid project ID, user not found, overlapping time range)
- You can re-run the prompt filtering to only rows where column G is empty — catching any that failed the first pass
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Dates are in a non-standard format
In my Migration Log worksheet, convert all dates in column C from DD/MM/YYYY to YYYY-MM-DD, then create Timely time entries for all 200 rows using project ID in column A, user in column B, converted date in column C, and hours in column D
Some rows are missing a project ID
Create Timely time entries from my Migration Log worksheet for all rows where column A is not empty — skip blank rows, use column A for project ID, column B for user, column C for date, and column D for hours — write the result into column E
User names need to be matched to Timely user IDs
In my Migration Log worksheet: look up each name in column B against my User Map worksheet which has names in column A and Timely user IDs in column B — use the matched ID to create each Timely time entry with project ID from column A, matched user ID, date from column C, and hours from column D
Full migration validation and create in one shot
In my Migration Log worksheet: skip any row where column A or column B is blank, convert dates in column C from DD/MM/YYYY to ISO format, look up user IDs from the User Map worksheet, then create a Timely time entry for each valid row — write the new event ID into column G and flag validation errors in column H
The pattern: do the data cleanup and the bulk create in a single prompt so you're not running two passes manually.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open your migration spreadsheet, then ask it to push all rows to Timely. For pulling existing time entries back into an Excel workbook, see the spoke on exporting time entries by date range.