The Scenario
It's the 28th of the month. Invoices go out on the 1st.
You have 15 active client projects tracked in DeskTime. Your billing manager needs total hours for each one — project name, project ID, hours to date — dropped into the InvoicePrep sheet so she can apply rates and generate the PDFs. She asked for it "whenever you get a chance," which both of you know means today.
The DeskTime dashboard has a project report. You know how to get there. What you don't have is the next 45 minutes it's going to take to pull each project, note the hours, format them consistently, and get them into the sheet without introducing any rounding errors.
The bad version:
- You go project by project in DeskTime — 15 clicks to open 15 reports
- Some projects show hours as decimals, others as HH:MM — you standardize them by hand
- You type the project IDs manually because the export doesn't include them in a column you can paste cleanly
Billing is already a deadline. Adding a data transcription exercise on top of it is the kind of task that makes people rethink their workflows on a Friday afternoon.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent that lives inside your Google Sheet. It reads the sheet structure, connects to DeskTime through its built-in integration, and pulls the project data you need in one request.
Open the SheetXAI sidebar and paste this:
List all DeskTime projects and their tracked time and paste them into the InvoicePrep sheet with project name, project ID, and total hours tracked to date
What You Get
- Column A: project name as it appears in DeskTime
- Column B: project ID (numeric)
- Column C: total hours tracked, formatted as decimal hours
- One row per project, all active projects included
- Archived projects excluded unless you ask for them
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
I need hours only for this calendar month, not all-time
Pull all active DeskTime projects and their tracked hours for 2026-05-01 through 2026-05-31. Write project name, project ID, and hours this month into the InvoicePrep sheet.
Some projects should be excluded from client billing
Fetch all active DeskTime projects with total hours to date. Write them into the InvoicePrep sheet, but skip any project whose name contains "Internal" or "Admin."
I need to cross-reference against my rate card in column D
Pull all active DeskTime projects with total hours tracked this month. Write project name into column A and hours into column B. Then look up each project name against the RateCard tab — if it's there, write the rate from column B of that tab into column C. Leave column C blank if no match.
Pull hours, flag overbilled projects, and compute invoice totals in one shot
Fetch all active DeskTime projects with hours tracked in May 2026. Write project name, project ID, and hours into columns A, B, and C. In column D, multiply hours by the rate in the RateCard tab (match on project name). Flag any row where hours exceed the budget in column E of the Budget tab with "Over" in column F.
One prompt. No intermediate steps.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open your billing prep sheet, then ask it to pull May's DeskTime project hours. The DeskTime integration is included in every SheetXAI plan. You might also want to look at pulling employee productivity stats or the DeskTime overview hub.