The Scenario
You are the owner of a 15-person studio. It is the last week of the quarter and finance needs the billing report.
You have 8 employees who have been logging time across 15 Basecamp projects for the past 3 months. The finance team needs billable hours per client, broken out by employee and project, in a Google Sheet. Basecamp has all the data. It is just not in the sheet yet.
The bad version of this week:
- You log into Basecamp, go to the Timesheet report for each project
- You read the entries on screen and manually copy them into a sheet
- You move to the next project
- Halfway through project 8, you realize you missed two entries in project 3 because the date filter was off by a day
- You go back, fix it
- You have burned a morning and you are halfway done.
The fast version is one prompt.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent inside your spreadsheet that reads the date range you specify and pulls every Basecamp time entry directly into the sheet.
Open the SheetXAI sidebar and type:
Fetch all Basecamp timesheet entries for the date range in cells B1:B2 and write person name, project name, date, hours, and description into my sheet starting at row 2.
SheetXAI calls Basecamp's API for the specified date range, pulls every time entry across all projects and employees, and writes the full data set into the sheet. Finance gets a clean table without anyone spending a morning on data entry.
What You Get
A Google Sheet populated with every Basecamp time entry for the quarter:
- Employee name — column A
- Project name — column B
- Date — column C
- Hours — column D
- Description — column E
Ready for finance to run SUMIF totals by project or pivot by employee. No manual copying, no missed entries, no date filter mistakes.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Timesheet data from any system has its quirks, and the finance report usually needs more than raw rows.
When you need SUMIF totals added automatically
The raw entries are useful, but finance wants subtotals by project below the data.
Pull all Basecamp timesheet entries for the date range in cells B1:B2 and write employee, project, date, hours, and description starting at row 2. After the last row, add SUMIF totals grouped by project name showing total hours per project.
When you need to flag employees who have not logged any time
Three employees may have logged nothing this quarter. Finance needs to know before the report goes out.
Fetch all Basecamp timesheet entries for the period in cells B1:B2. Write them to the sheet starting at row 2. Then compare the employee list in the Staff tab column A against the employees who appear in the pulled data. List any employees with zero hours in a new "Missing Timesheets" section below the main data.
When you need to separate billable from non-billable time
Some time entries are tagged as non-billable. The invoice should only include billable hours.
Pull all Basecamp timesheet entries for the date range in cells B1:B2. Write all entries to the sheet starting at row 2 with a "Billable" column. Filter a second table below that includes only billable rows, and add a total billable hours sum at the bottom of the second table.
When the client needs a formatted invoice summary, not just raw data
Finance wants the raw data in one tab and a formatted per-client summary in a second tab.
Pull Basecamp timesheet data for the date range in cells B1:B2. Write all raw entries to the Raw tab. Then, in the Summary tab, create one section per project with the project name as a heading, the employees and hours as rows, and a total at the bottom of each section. This is the tab that goes to the client.
The pattern: pull once, structure in the same prompt. You get raw data and the finance-ready view in one instruction.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open a blank sheet, then ask it to pull your Basecamp timesheet data for any date range. The Basecamp integration is included in every plan. See also how to bulk-create Basecamp to-dos from a sprint sheet or the Basecamp in Google Sheets overview.