The Scenario
You are a finance director at an 85-person company. The board presentation is Thursday at 2 PM. The CFO has asked for a full employee headcount breakdown: every employee, their department, job title, start date, and current salary, in a single Excel-ready table.
BreatheHR has all of it. Getting it out is the problem.
The slow version:
- Navigate to BreatheHR's employee reports
- Export what is available as a CSV
- Import into Google Sheets
- Realize the salary field is not in the export
- Navigate to the salary reports section
- Export that separately
- VLOOKUP the two exports together by employee ID
- Fix the mismatched employee IDs where BreatheHR used different formats
- It is Wednesday evening and you still have a headcount table with 11 blanks in the salary column.
The fast version is one prompt.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI reads BreatheHR across record types and writes everything into your sheet in one go.
Open the SheetXAI sidebar and type:
Pull all BreatheHR employees into this sheet. Include employee ID, full name, email address, department, job title, company join date, and current salary from the salary records. One row per employee. Sort by department, then by last name.
SheetXAI calls BreatheHR, pulls the employee directory and salary records, joins them, sorts the output, and writes the complete table into your sheet. No VLOOKUP, no second CSV.
What You Get
A clean table, one row per employee, with:
- Employee ID — BreatheHR's internal ID for cross-referencing
- Full name — first and last
- Email — from the employee record
- Department and job title — current values from BreatheHR
- Company join date — formatted consistently
- Current salary — pulled from the salary records and joined to the employee row
The board table is ready on Tuesday afternoon, not Wednesday night. All 85 employees, all the fields the CFO asked for, no gaps.
If you want tenure calculated, tell SheetXAI to add a column showing years of service from the join date. It does it in the same prompt.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Headcount tables for boards usually need more than a raw export. SheetXAI handles the additional logic in the same prompt.
When salary basis is inconsistent
Some employees are salaried annually, some are paid hourly. The salary column shows raw numbers with no context.
Pull all BreatheHR employees into this sheet with salary amount and salary basis. Where salary basis is "Hourly," add a calculated annual equivalent in a new column assuming 37.5 hours per week and 52 weeks. Where salary basis is "Annual," leave the salary amount as the annual figure.
When the board wants it grouped by pay band
The CFO wants employees bucketed into pay bands for the headcount slide.
Pull all BreatheHR employees with their current salary. Add a "Pay Band" column: "Under £30k," "£30k–£50k," "£50k–£75k," and "Above £75k." Count employees per band in a summary row at the bottom of each group.
When you need headcount change versus last quarter
You have a Q1 headcount snapshot in the Q1 tab. The board wants to see net change.
Pull all current BreatheHR employees into the Q2 tab. Compare the employee IDs in Q2 against the Q1 tab. Write "New" next to employees who appear in Q2 but not Q1, and note how many employees from Q1 are no longer in Q2 in a summary cell at the top.
When the export needs to be board-ready in one shot
The board table should include headcount, average tenure, and average salary per department, not just a raw employee list.
Pull all BreatheHR employees with department, join date, and current salary. Calculate average salary and average tenure in years for each department. Build a department summary table above the employee list showing headcount, average salary, and average tenure per department. Then fill in the full employee list below.
The pattern: instead of pulling a raw export and building formulas on top, you describe the table you need and SheetXAI builds it.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open any headcount tracking sheet, then ask it to pull the full BreatheHR employee directory. The BreatheHR integration is included in every SheetXAI plan. For related workflows, see how to generate a salary audit sheet or the BreatheHR in Google Sheets overview.