The Scenario
You are a payroll manager. Payroll closes Friday at noon. It is Thursday morning and you need every absence taken company-wide in April, sick leave, holiday, and anything else, so you can reconcile against contracted hours and flag anything that needs an adjustment.
BreatheHR has the records. Getting them into your Google Sheet is the job.
The bad version of this Thursday:
- Navigate to BreatheHR's absence module
- Export sick leave for April
- Export holiday for April
- Export "other" absences for April, if the filter even works that way
- Combine three CSV files in Google Sheets
- Notice that the date formats are different across the three exports
- Normalize the dates
- Realize the employee names in one export do not exactly match the other two
- Fix the mismatches
- It is 3 PM on Thursday, payroll closes tomorrow at noon, and you are still reconciling column headers.
The fast version is one prompt.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI connects to BreatheHR and pulls the absence data for you, already cleaned and structured.
Open the SheetXAI sidebar and type:
Pull all BreatheHR absences between 1 April and 30 April into this sheet. Include employee name, absence type, start date, end date, and total days. Group rows by employee name, then sort within each employee's block by start date.
SheetXAI calls BreatheHR, pulls every absence in the date range regardless of type, and writes the grouped, sorted results into your sheet. One pull, all types, one clean table.
What You Get
An absence table for April, ready for payroll reconciliation:
- Employee name — consistent, pulled from BreatheHR records
- Absence type — sick, holiday, or other, exactly as recorded
- Start date and end date — formatted consistently
- Total days — as BreatheHR calculated them, not a formula you have to write
All three absence types in one table. No merging three CSVs, no date-format mismatch, no lookup failures.
If payroll needs a department-level summary, ask SheetXAI to add a subtotal row after each department's employees. Same prompt, add one sentence.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Absence data for payroll often needs a layer of logic before it is usable. SheetXAI handles it inline.
When some absence records have missing end dates
An employee submitted a rolling sick leave entry and the end date is blank because they are still off.
Pull all BreatheHR absences for April. Where the end date is blank, mark the total days as "TBC" and flag those rows in a new column called "Needs Review." For all other rows, populate total days normally.
When you need to separate statutory sick pay days from regular sick days
Your payroll system treats the first three sick days differently from day four onward.
Pull all sick-leave absences from BreatheHR for April. For each sick leave record, add a column showing how many of the days fall into the SSP waiting period (days 1–3) and how many qualify for SSP (day 4 onward). Use the start date and end date to calculate this.
When you only need absences for one department
The engineering payroll run is separate from the rest of the company.
Pull all BreatheHR absences between 1 April and 30 April for employees in the Engineering department only. Include employee name, absence type, start date, end date, and total days.
When you need absence totals joined to contracted hours for reconciliation
The reconciliation table needs absence days next to contracted hours per employee, pulled from a separate tab.
Pull all BreatheHR absences for April. Join the total absence days per employee to the contracted hours in the Contracts tab of this sheet, matching on employee name. Add a "Hours Absent" column converting absence days to hours using the contracted hours per day from the Contracts tab. Flag anyone whose absence hours exceed 20% of their contracted hours in a "Flag" column.
The pattern: instead of exporting and cleaning, you describe the reconciliation table you need and SheetXAI builds it from the BreatheHR data.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open any payroll or attendance sheet, then ask it to pull absence records for your date range. The BreatheHR integration is included in every SheetXAI plan. For related workflows, see how to export a department absence and bonus summary or the BreatheHR in Google Sheets overview.