The Scenario
You run a consultancy managing 25 active FreeAgent projects. Your monthly management meeting is next Tuesday and the MD wants a profitability snapshot before then.
You need project name, status, budget, and total billed hours for every active project — and then a margin calculation. The budget is in FreeAgent. The billed hours are in timeslips. They have never been in the same spreadsheet.
The slow version:
- Go to FreeAgent Projects, open each project one by one, note the budget
- Go to Timeslips, filter by project, note the total hours
- Open Google Sheets, type the figures in manually — two FreeAgent screens per row
- Calculate budget hours (budget ÷ rate) and compare to actual hours
- Three hours later you have 25 rows and no confidence in the numbers.
The fast version is one prompt.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent inside your spreadsheet that can pull project metadata and timeslip totals across FreeAgent in one go.
Open the SheetXAI sidebar and type:
List all projects in FreeAgent and write project name, client, status, and budget into columns A through D. For each project, fetch all associated timeslips, sum the total hours, and write the sum into column E alongside the project budget in column D.
SheetXAI calls the FreeAgent projects endpoint, then for each project fetches the timeslips and sums the hours. You get a single sheet with both the budget and the actual hours for all 25 projects.
What You Get
A project profitability sheet with:
- Column A — project name
- Column B — client name
- Column C — project status (active, completed)
- Column D — project budget (in currency)
- Column E — total hours billed from timeslips
You have everything you need to calculate margin in column F — you can ask SheetXAI to do that too in the same prompt, or add the formula yourself. Either way, the two pieces of data that used to require 50 separate FreeAgent screens are now in one sheet.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Project profitability analysis always surfaces edge cases.
When you only want active projects, not archived ones
FreeAgent has a mix of active, completed, and archived projects and you only want the ones currently running.
List all FreeAgent projects with status 'active' only. Write project name, client, status, and budget into columns A through D. Sum all associated timeslip hours per project and write the total into column E.
When you want margin calculated automatically
Budget is in currency, hours are in hours. You have a blended rate in cell G1 and want margin shown as a percentage.
Pull all active FreeAgent projects into columns A through D with total billed hours in column E. In column F, calculate estimated revenue as hours in column E times the rate in cell G1. In column G, calculate margin as (column D minus column F) divided by column D, formatted as a percentage. Write 'OVER BUDGET' in column H for any project where margin is negative.
When you want the data split by client instead of by project
Your MD wants to see profitability rolled up per client, not per individual project.
Pull all active FreeAgent projects and their timeslip totals. Instead of listing each project individually, group the output by client name — one row per client showing total budget across all their projects, total hours billed, and number of active projects.
When you want the full profitability report: pull projects, pull timeslips, calculate margin, flag at-risk projects, and sort by risk
Your Tuesday meeting needs a ready-to-discuss report, not a data dump.
List all FreeAgent projects with status active or completed in the last 90 days. Write project name, client, and budget to columns A, B, C. Sum timeslip hours per project and write to column D. Calculate estimated fee burned as hours times a blended rate of 125 and write to column E. In column F, calculate remaining budget as column C minus column E. Write 'AT RISK' in column G for any project where remaining budget is below 10% of original budget. Sort the entire sheet by column F ascending so the most at-risk projects are at the top.
The pattern: instead of manually joining project and timeslip data across two FreeAgent screens repeated 25 times, you describe the output you need and SheetXAI handles both API calls and the join logic.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open a Google Sheet, then ask it to pull all your active FreeAgent projects with total billed hours. The FreeAgent integration is included in every SheetXAI plan. See also how to export FreeAgent timeslips for billing verification or the FreeAgent in Google Sheets overview.