The Scenario
You are a program manager at a company that runs twelve product initiatives this quarter. The finance committee approved budgets for all twelve last Thursday. You have a Google Sheet with the planning data: project name, owner's Brex user ID, approved budget amount, and period type.
Every approved initiative needs a Brex budget created before the teams start spending. The first sprints kick off Monday.
The slow version:
- Open Brex admin, navigate to Budgets, click Create Budget
- Enter the project name, set the owner, enter the amount, choose the period
- Save, then create the next one
- Twelve times
- Realize on budget eight that you set the wrong owner because "Johnson, M." and "Johnson, K." look the same in the dropdown when you are moving fast
- Fix budget eight, then double-check seven, nine, and ten just to be sure.
The fast version is one prompt.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI reads the planning sheet and creates every Brex budget from the data in it.
Open the SheetXAI sidebar and type:
Create a Brex budget for every row in this sheet. Use the project name from column A as the budget name, the Brex user ID from column B as the budget owner, the approved amount from column C as the budget limit, and the period type from column D. Write "Created" or the error message into column E for each row.
SheetXAI reads all twelve rows, calls Brex's budget creation endpoint for each, and writes the result into column E. Twelve budgets created, one column of confirmation.
What You Get
Column E with a status for every budget:
- "Created" — budget set up in Brex with the correct owner, amount, and period
- Error message — if the user ID was not found or the period type was invalid
The owner IDs come from column B, not from a dropdown. No misidentified Johnsons.
If any rows fail, the error message tells you why. Fix those rows and re-run. The others are already done.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Budget-planning sheets always arrive with at least one structural quirk. SheetXAI handles them inline.
When owner names are in the sheet instead of Brex user IDs
The finance committee wrote owner names, not Brex user IDs. You have a separate Employee Directory tab mapping names to IDs.
For each row in this sheet, look up the owner name in column B against the Employee Directory tab to get the Brex user ID. Use the matched user ID, the project name from column A, the amount from column C, and the period from column D to create the Brex budget. Write the resolved user ID and the creation result into columns E and F.
When some projects share the same budget pool
Three projects in the sheet are sub-initiatives of a larger initiative and should share one Brex budget instead of getting individual budgets.
For rows where column E says "Shared," combine the amounts from those rows and create one Brex budget using the parent project name from column F as the budget name and the combined amount as the limit. For all other rows, create individual budgets as normal. Write the result into column G for each row.
When budget periods are inconsistent
Some rows have "Monthly," some have "Quarterly," some have "Custom," and one row is blank.
Before creating budgets, validate the period type in column D for each row. If it is blank, default to "Monthly." If it is a value Brex does not recognize, write "Invalid period — skipped" into column E without creating the budget. For valid rows, create the budget and write "Created" into column E.
When you need to create budgets and immediately add team members to each one
Each budget in the planning sheet has a list of team members in column E who should have access to spend against it.
Create a Brex budget for each row using project name from column A, owner ID from column B, amount from column C, and period from column D. After creating each budget, add each user listed in column E as a budget member. Column E values are Brex user IDs separated by commas. Write the budget creation result and the member-add result into columns F and G for each row.
The pattern: the planning sheet is the single source of truth. SheetXAI reads it once and builds every budget from it, including the edge cases that would have cost you a re-do in the Brex UI.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open the budget-planning sheet your finance committee produces after each approval cycle, then ask it to create all the Brex budgets in one go. The Brex integration is included in every SheetXAI plan. See also how to snapshot all Brex budgets with burn-rate analysis or the Brex in Google Sheets overview.