The Scenario
It is Thursday afternoon. You manage eight contractors across three agency clients, and every one of them bills by the hour. You have always trusted WakaTime to be the source of truth — it runs silently in every editor, it never lies, and it does not depend on anyone remembering to start a timer. What it does not do is put its data in the same Excel workbook as your invoice review checklist.
The bad version:
- You log into WakaTime, navigate to each contractor's account or pull the team summary, and export a CSV for the 30-day billing period.
- You open the CSV in a separate worksheet, manually copy the rows for the relevant projects, and paste them into the billing workbook — then spend 20 minutes renaming columns that never match the headers you set up last quarter.
- You repeat this for each contractor and reconcile any discrepancy in project naming by hand, because WakaTime calls the project "acme-redesign" and your workbook calls it "Acme Web."
Your billing deadline is end of day Friday, and this reconciliation work is not what you were hired to do. That time belongs on something that actually earns the agency money.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
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 WakaTime integration it pulls coding summaries directly — no CSV export, no column renaming, no worksheet-switching.
Open your billing workbook and paste this:
Fetch my WakaTime summaries for the date range in B1:B2 and fill this Excel table with Date, Project, Language, Hours — one row per combination
What You Get
- One row per unique date-project-language combination, written directly into the workbook starting at the next empty row.
- Column headers: Date, Project, Language, Hours — exactly as requested.
- Project names come through as WakaTime recorded them, so you can use VLOOKUP against your client mapping column to normalize names in one additional step.
- If the date range returns zero entries for a project, that project simply does not appear — no blank rows to clean up.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
The project names do not match your client list
Your workbook has canonical client names in column A. WakaTime uses internal project slugs that differ:
Pull WakaTime coding summaries for the last 30 days. For each row, check if the project name appears in column A and write the matched client name in column C, or "Unmatched" if there is no match. Fill columns D, E, F with Date, Language, Hours.
You only want hours above a threshold
You bill a minimum of 0.5 hours per entry. Anything shorter gets rolled up:
Fetch WakaTime summaries for the last 30 days, drop any rows where Hours is under 0.5, and paste the remaining rows into this workbook with columns: Date, Project, Language, Hours.
You need to cross-reference with existing project codes
Your workbook has project codes in column B that correspond to WakaTime project names. You want the code written alongside the hours:
Pull WakaTime coding summaries for the last 30 days. For each row, look up the project name against column A and write the project code from column B in a new Code column. Paste results into this workbook with columns: Date, Project, Code, Language, Hours.
Clean names, filter short sessions, and flag missing projects in one shot
Pull WakaTime summaries for the last 30 days. Drop rows where Hours is under 0.5. For each remaining row, look up the project name against column A and write the canonical client name in a Client column, or "REVIEW" if not found. Paste the final table starting at row 5 with columns: Date, Client, Project, Language, Hours — sorted by Client then Date.
The pattern: ask for the filtering and the normalization in the same prompt so you arrive at a reviewable table rather than a raw dump.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open the billing workbook you run every month — ask it to pull last month's WakaTime summaries by project and language, and it will write the table without you touching a CSV. See also how to generate a client billing report from WakaTime in Excel, or go back to the WakaTime integration overview.