The Scenario
Payroll runs on the first of the month. The payroll manager's rule is firm: once payroll runs, no time entries for that period can be edited. The problem is enforcing it in Timely — day locking has to be applied per user, and there are 40 people on the team. She has their user IDs in column A of a Excel workbook. Every month, she manually locks March 31 for each of the 40 users by clicking through the Timely admin panel, one user at a time.
The bad version:
- Open Timely's day locking section, find the first user ID, set the lock date to March 31, save
- Find the next user, set the lock, save
- Repeat 38 more times, keeping track in your head of which users you've already done because there's no progress indicator
Forty users is not a large team. It's large enough that the monthly locking ritual takes 30 minutes and produces a low-grade dread in the payroll manager every time it appears on her calendar.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent that lives inside your Excel workbook. It reads your workbook and through its built-in Timely integration it can lock a date for every user on your list in one operation.
Lock March 31, 2025 for every user ID listed in column A of my Payroll Lock worksheet using Timely day locking — write the result into column B
What You Get
- Timely receives a day-lock call for each user ID in column A
- Column B fills with "locked" if successful, or an error message if the user ID wasn't found or the date was already locked
- All 40 users locked in one pass — the monthly ritual becomes a one-prompt operation
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
The lock date varies per user
For each row in my Payroll Lock worksheet, lock the date in column B for the user ID in column A using Timely day locking — write the result into column C
Some user IDs are stale or have been deactivated
Lock March 31, 2025 for every user ID in column A of my Payroll Lock worksheet — skip any ID that returns a "user not found" error and flag those rows in column C instead of stopping the whole operation
You need to lock multiple dates per user
For each row in my Payroll Lock worksheet: lock both March 31, 2025 and April 30, 2025 for the user ID in column A — write the result for March into column B and the result for April into column C
Full payroll lock with audit trail in one pass
In my Payroll Lock worksheet: lock March 31, 2025 for every non-empty user ID in column A — write "locked" into column B for successes, write the error message for any failure, add a timestamp in column C, and add a summary at the bottom showing how many succeeded and how many failed
The pattern: include the error handling and the audit trail in one ask so you can hand the result to your compliance team without running a separate verification.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open your payroll lock sheet, then ask it to lock the cutoff date for all users in Timely. For exporting the user list to verify you have the right IDs, see the spoke on exporting the Timely user list.