The Scenario
You are the CFO of a forty-person startup. It is the last Thursday of the quarter. The board deck goes out tomorrow at 8 AM.
You have twenty active Brex budgets, engineering, sales, marketing, HR, travel, and fourteen project-specific ones. You need a one-page budget burn table: limit, spent, remaining, and percentage for each budget, with anything over 80% spent flagged red.
The slow version of Thursday afternoon:
- Log into Brex, navigate to Budgets
- Click into each budget one by one to see the current numbers
- Open a blank Google Sheet, type the budget names by hand
- Enter each limit and spent figure manually
- Add a formula column for remaining
- Add another formula column for percentage
- Scroll back to Brex to double-check three numbers you are not sure about
- It is 7 PM and you still need to write the commentary.
The fast version is one prompt.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI pulls every budget directly from Brex, so you do not have to click through twenty budget pages or type a single number.
Open the SheetXAI sidebar and type:
Pull all active Brex budgets into this sheet. Include budget name, owner, period type, total limit, amount spent to date, and remaining balance. Add a column called Spend % that calculates spent divided by limit. Flag any budget where Spend % is over 80 by writing "OVER 80%" in a Status column. Sort by Spend % descending.
SheetXAI retrieves all twenty budgets, writes the rows, adds the Spend % formula, adds the Status column, and sorts descending. The highest-risk budgets are at the top.
What You Get
A clean burn-rate table sorted by risk:
- Budget name — as labeled in Brex
- Owner — the budget owner's name
- Period type — monthly, quarterly, or custom
- Total limit — the approved budget ceiling
- Amount spent — as of this moment
- Remaining balance — calculated
- Spend % — calculated
- Status — "OVER 80%" for any budget past that threshold
The numbers are live from Brex, not from a week-old export. Every time you re-run the prompt you get the current state.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Budget snapshots for board decks need more than raw numbers. SheetXAI can layer in analysis in the same prompt.
When you need to compare against last quarter
The board wants to see whether burn rates have improved since Q1.
Pull all active Brex budgets into this sheet with the standard columns. Add a second tab called Q1 Comparison. In the Q1 Comparison tab, show the same budgets side by side with their Q3 spend percentage (from this sheet) and the Q1 spend percentage from the Q1 Actuals tab in this workbook. Highlight budgets where the spend percentage got worse.
When only department budgets matter, not project budgets
You want to show the board the departmental view, not the fourteen project budgets.
Pull all active Brex budgets into this sheet. Filter to budgets where the owner is a department head, not a project lead. The department heads are listed in the Department Heads tab. Show only those budgets, sorted by spend percentage descending.
When you need a commentary column
The CFO commentary column is always the last thing written before the deck goes out.
Pull all active Brex budgets into this sheet with the standard columns. Add a Commentary column. For each budget over 80% spent, write a one-sentence explanation of the likely cause based on the budget name and category. For budgets under 50% spent, write "On track."
When the board wants a consolidated view across multiple Brex entities
Your company has two Brex accounts, one for the US entity and one for the European subsidiary. The board wants one table.
Pull all active budgets from both Brex entities into this sheet. Add an Entity column showing which account each budget belongs to. Calculate a combined total row at the bottom showing aggregate limit, spent, and remaining across both entities. Flag any budget over 80% spent in a Status column.
The pattern: the snapshot takes one prompt, and analysis layers onto the same prompt without a second pass.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open a blank Google Sheet before your next board prep, then ask it to pull all your Brex budgets with burn-rate analysis. The Brex integration is included in every SheetXAI plan. For related workflows, see how to export Brex transactions for month-end reconciliation or the Brex in Google Sheets overview.