The Scenario
You're a project manager at a small consulting firm. Q2 just ended. Finance needs a breakdown of every expense logged in Clientary across all projects — by client, by project, with a flag on anything that went over budget.
You have the project budget targets in a reference sheet. What you don't have is the Q2 expense data in any usable form.
The bad version:
- Open each project in Clientary one at a time, navigate to Expenses, export the entries, paste them into a master sheet — aligning columns across 6 different export formats.
- Build a summary tab manually using SUMIF formulas across the pasted data, hoping the project names in the export match the names in your budget reference tab.
- Flag the over-budget projects by hand, format the summary for the finance team, and send it — then get a reply asking you to add Q1 for comparison.
Finance doesn't want a rough cut. They want the definitive number, broken down clearly, ready for a budget review presentation. The fact that it takes you half a day to produce it is invisible to everyone except you.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent that lives inside your Google Sheet. It reads the sheet and talks to Clientary for you — pulling all expenses from a date range, writing them into the sheet, and building the summary logic you'd otherwise do with formulas. Open the sidebar and describe the pull.
Fetch all Clientary expenses from April 1 to June 30 and write project name, client, amount, description, and date into this sheet — one row per expense. Then add a Summary tab showing total spend by client, and highlight in red any client where total expenses exceeded their project budget in column B of the Budget tab.
What You Get
- One row per expense in the Expenses tab: project name, client, amount, description, and date from Clientary.
- A Summary tab with one row per client, showing total Q2 spend and the budget from your reference tab joined by client name.
- Red highlighting on any client whose total spend exceeded their budget, so the finance conversation starts on the right rows.
- Any expense record missing a client assignment surfaces in a separate Unassigned section at the bottom of the Expenses tab.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Project names in Clientary don't match the budget reference tab
Your budget reference tab uses "Project Alpha" and Clientary uses "Alpha - 2026 Retainer." The join fails.
Fetch all Q2 expenses from Clientary and write them to the Expenses tab. Then attempt to join each project name against the Budget tab using a fuzzy match on the first word of the project name. For rows where the match is ambiguous, write the Clientary name and the closest match candidate into a Review tab so I can confirm the right link.
You need to split expenses by category, not just by client
Finance wants total spend broken down by expense category (travel, software, contractor) across all clients.
Fetch all Clientary expenses from April 1 to June 30 and write them to the Expenses tab. Build two summary tabs: one grouped by client with total spend, and one grouped by expense category with totals and the percentage each category represents of the overall Q2 spend.
Some expenses are missing required fields
A few entries in Clientary have no description or no linked project. They need to be flagged rather than silently included.
Fetch all Q2 expenses from Clientary. For any expense missing a project link or description, write it into a Flagged tab with the expense ID and the missing field identified. Write all complete expenses into the Expenses tab and build the client summary as usual.
Full kill chain: pull, validate, summarize, highlight, compare to Q1
Fetch all Clientary expenses from April 1 to June 30. Flag incomplete records (missing project or description) in a Flagged tab. Write complete expenses to the Expenses tab. Build a Summary tab with total spend by client. Join against the Budget tab using client name and highlight rows where spend exceeded budget. Then pull Q1 expenses (January 1 to March 31) and add a Q1 vs Q2 comparison column in the Summary tab.
One prompt covers the pull, the validation, the summary, and the comparison — so the output finance receives is complete rather than a work in progress.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open a sheet with your Clientary project list, then ask it to pull all Q2 expenses and build the client summary against your budget tab. For the billing side of the same projects, the Unbilled Hours and Invoicing spoke covers time-entry aggregation. The full Clientary hub covers every workflow.