The Scenario
You are a controller at a company that recently adopted Brex and is implementing a chart-of-accounts integration. To make expenses taggable by GL code, every cost-centre code needs to exist as a value under a Brex custom field called "Cost Centre."
Your chart of accounts has three hundred cost-centre codes in a Google Sheet, column A is the code, column B is the display name. Until those values exist in Brex, employees cannot tag their expenses correctly, and the month-end sync to the accounting system will fail.
The accounting integration goes live in five days.
The slow version:
- Open Brex admin, navigate to Custom Fields, open the Cost Centre field
- Click "Add Value" three hundred times
- Copy the code from column A, paste it as the value
- Copy the display name from column B, paste it as the label
- Save each one
- Lose count around value forty and have to re-check where you left off
- Finish at midnight on day two, with two days to spare but no energy left.
The fast version is one prompt.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI reads the chart of accounts and loads every cost-centre code into the Brex custom field in one go.
Open the SheetXAI sidebar and type:
Create a Brex custom field value for every row in this sheet under the custom field called "Cost Centre." Use the value in column A as the field value and the value in column B as the display name. Write "Created" or the error message into column C for each row.
SheetXAI iterates through all three hundred rows, calls Brex's custom field value API for each, and writes the result into column C. Three hundred codes loaded, one column of confirmation.
What You Get
Column C with a creation status for every code:
- "Created" — value loaded successfully
- Error message — if the value already exists or the format was invalid
The codes come from column A, the display names from column B. No typos from manual entry, no skipped rows.
If any rows fail because they already exist from a prior partial load, the error tells you. You filter for errors and re-run only those.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
GL code sheets from accounting are rarely upload-ready. SheetXAI handles the edge cases inline.
When some codes already exist in Brex from a prior partial load
You started loading codes last month and stopped halfway. You do not want duplicate values.
Before creating each value, check whether a custom field value with that code already exists under the "Cost Centre" field in Brex. If it exists, write "Already exists — skip" in column C. If it does not, create it and write "Created" in column C.
When codes use inconsistent formatting
Some codes in column A have leading zeros, some do not. Some have spaces, some do not. Brex will create separate values for "1001" and "01001."
Before creating custom field values, normalize the codes in column A: remove leading spaces and ensure all codes are zero-padded to five digits. Write the normalized code into column A, then create the Brex custom field value using the normalized code and the display name from column B. Write the result into column C.
When the custom field does not yet exist and needs to be created first
The "Cost Centre" custom field has not been set up in Brex yet.
First, create a Brex custom field called "Cost Centre" of type dropdown if it does not already exist. Then create a custom field value for every row in this sheet using column A as the value and column B as the display name. Write the result into column C.
When multiple custom fields need to be populated from the same sheet
Your chart of accounts sheet has cost-centre codes in column A, project codes in column D, and entity codes in column G. All three need their own Brex custom fields.
Create Brex custom field values for three fields from this sheet: one row per entry in column A for the "Cost Centre" field, one row per entry in column D for the "Project Code" field, and one row per entry in column G for the "Entity" field. Write creation results for each field into columns B, E, and H respectively.
The pattern: the chart of accounts is the source of truth. SheetXAI reads it once and builds the Brex taxonomy from it in one pass.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open the chart-of-accounts sheet your accounting team maintains, then ask it to load all the cost-centre codes into the Brex custom field before your accounting integration goes live. The Brex integration is included in every SheetXAI plan. See also how to bulk-create Brex project budgets from a planning sheet or the Brex in Google Sheets overview.