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Bulk Set Custom Field Values on Ashby Applications From a Google Sheet

2026-05-14
5 min read

The Scenario

Marketing attribution got re-analyzed last week. Sixty applications that were labeled "Inbound - Website" should have been labeled "Outbound - LinkedIn Campaign." Your recruiter has already updated the source mapping in the company's tracking sheet — column A has Ashby application IDs, column B has the correct custom field slug, column C has the new value. She needs those custom fields updated in Ashby before the sourcing report runs Friday.

The bad version:

  • Open Ashby, search for the first application ID, navigate to the application detail, scroll to the custom fields section, find the "Sourcing Channel" field, click "Edit," type the new value, save.
  • Go back to the sheet. Find the next application ID. Search for it in Ashby.
  • At row 20 you mistype a value — "Outbound - LinkedIn Campign" — and don't notice. The report runs Friday with a typo that splits the channel into two separate rows in the pivot.

Sixty applications. Four minutes each. Four hours of work that introduces human error at scale.

The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI

SheetXAI is an AI agent that lives inside your Google Sheet. It reads the mapping and updates the Ashby custom fields through a built-in integration, one row at a time, with no manual clicking.

For each row in this sheet, set the Ashby custom field with the slug in column B on the application in column A to the value in column C. Write "Done" or error into column D.

SheetXAI works through all 60 rows and writes a result to column D for each one — "Done" for success, the error text for anything that fails.

What You Get

  • Column D shows "Done" for every successfully updated application.
  • Rows that fail — wrong application ID, invalid custom field slug, type mismatch — show the exact error.
  • The values in Ashby match the sheet exactly — no typos from manual entry.
  • The sourcing report runs clean on Friday.

What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready

The custom field slug in column B uses the display name, not the API slug

For each row in this sheet, look up the Ashby custom field whose display name matches column B and use its slug to set the value in column C on the application in column A. Write "Done" or error into column D.

Some applications in column A belong to candidates, not applications

For each row in this sheet, if column D says "candidate", set the custom field in column B to the value in column C on the Ashby candidate in column A. If column D says "application", set it on the application. Write "Done" or error into column E.

Values in column C need to match a fixed option set in Ashby

Before updating, validate that the value in column C is one of the allowed options for the custom field in column B. If not, write "Invalid option" in column D and skip. For valid rows, update the Ashby application and write "Done" into column D.

Normalize values, validate field slugs, and apply all updates in one pass

Trim whitespace from all values in column C. For each row, confirm the custom field slug in column B exists in Ashby. If it does not, write "Field not found" in column D and skip. For valid rows, set the custom field to the trimmed value and write "Done" into column D.

Try It

Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open any Google Sheet tracking Ashby field corrections or re-attribution updates, then ask it to apply all the changes in one pass. See also the spoke on building a sourcing channel attribution report, or return to the Ashby overview.

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