The Scenario
You're a data entry specialist at a charity and every Monday morning a CSV arrives from your fundraising platform with 200 new donation records — constituent ID, amount, date, payment type. Your job is to get all of them into the open Blackbaud batch before the afternoon reconciliation call. Last week it took four hours. This week the call is at noon.
The bad version:
- Open Blackbaud, navigate to the open batch, and manually add each gift record one at a time from the CSV
- Hit a validation error on row 73 because the payment type format doesn't match Blackbaud's expected values — and have to go back and fix each one
- Enter 150 records, lose count, and spend 20 minutes trying to figure out whether you already added the ones between row 80 and row 90
Your job description says "data entry specialist" but this is less entry and more hostage negotiation with a spreadsheet and a clunky UI.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent inside your Google Sheet. It reads your donation rows, pushes each one to Blackbaud Raiser's Edge NXT via the gift batch API, and writes a summary of what went through and what errored — all without you touching the Blackbaud UI.
Open the SheetXAI sidebar and enter:
For each row in this sheet (constituent ID in column A, amount in column B, gift date in column C, payment type in column D), add the gift to the Blackbaud batch ID in cell F1. Write a summary row at the bottom with total gifts added, total amount, and count of any rows that errored
What You Get
- Each row processed in order; successful submissions get "ADDED" written to column E
- Rows that error get the error message from Blackbaud's API written to column E instead
- A summary row appended below the data: total row count, success count, error count, and total dollar amount submitted
- The batch ID from cell F1 is used for every row — no hardcoding, no prompt editing week to week
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Payment type values in the CSV don't match Blackbaud's expected format
Before submitting, normalize the payment type values in column D: map "credit_card" to "CreditCard", "check" to "Check", "ach" to "ACH", and "cash" to "Cash". Then for each row, add the gift to Blackbaud batch ID in cell F1 using constituent ID from column A, amount from column B, gift date from column C, and the normalized payment type. Write submission status to column E and a summary row at the bottom
Some rows are missing a constituent ID and need to be skipped
Skip any row where column A is blank. For all other rows, add the gift to Blackbaud batch ID in cell F1 using constituent ID from column A, amount from column B, gift date from column C, and payment type from column D. Write "SKIPPED" to column E for blank-ID rows, submission status for all others, and a summary row at the bottom with counts of added, skipped, and errored records
The donation data spans two tabs and needs to be merged before batch upload
The "Week1" tab has 120 donation rows and the "Week2" tab has 80. Combine all rows from both tabs and remove any duplicates where constituent ID, amount, and gift date all match. Then add each unique gift to Blackbaud batch ID in cell F1 on the "Config" tab. Write a status column and summary on a new "Upload Log" tab
Some amounts look wrong — do a validation pass, fix what you can, upload what clears, and summarize everything
Before uploading, flag any row where the amount in column B is less than 1 or greater than 500000 as potentially invalid — write "REVIEW" to column E for those rows. For all other rows, normalize the payment type in column D (credit_card → CreditCard, check → Check, ach → ACH), then add each gift to Blackbaud batch ID in cell F1. Write the submission result to column E for every processed row and add a summary at the bottom with total uploaded, total amount, count of REVIEW rows, and count of errors
One pass handles the validation, normalization, submission, and reporting — the full Monday morning workflow.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open your weekly donation export with constituent IDs in column A and amounts in column B, then ask it to stage the full batch into Blackbaud and return a count of what went through. Also worth reading: fetching individual gift details and flagging lapsed memberships — both covered in the Blackbaud overview.