The Scenario
You're an agency owner running 18 active client projects in FreshBooks. Quarterly review is next week and your ops lead just asked for a margin health summary — budget vs. billed vs. hours logged for every active project, in one place, before end of day.
You've never exported project data from FreshBooks before. You go looking for the report and find that FreshBooks shows project summaries one at a time inside the project view. There is no "export all projects" button that gives you budget and billed side by side.
The bad version:
- Click into each of the 18 projects one at a time, note the budget and billed amount, and paste them into your Google Sheet manually.
- Realize the hours-logged figure is on a different tab inside the project and go back through all 18 again.
- Build the margin formula yourself after discovering two projects have no budget set, which breaks the division and throws a #DIV/0 across those rows.
Your ops lead needed this an hour ago. The quarterly review isn't going to reschedule itself.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent that lives inside your Google Sheet. It reads your data context and connects to FreshBooks to pull exactly what you ask for — no clicking through individual project views.
Fetch all active FreshBooks projects and write project name, client name, budget, and billed amount into columns A through D
What You Get
- Column A: project name
- Column B: client name associated with the project
- Column C: total project budget in dollars
- Column D: total billed amount to date
- One row per active project, no archived or completed projects unless you ask for them
- Projects with no budget set show a 0 in column C so your margin formula doesn't error
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Budget is missing for some projects
If a few projects were set up without a budget and you need to flag them rather than silently zero them:
Fetch all active FreshBooks projects and write project name, client name, budget, and billed amount into columns A through D — in column E, write "No budget set" if the budget is zero or null, otherwise leave it blank
You want to compute margin utilization inline
If you'd rather have the percentage calculated on the way in:
Pull all FreshBooks projects and write project name, client name, budget, billed amount, and budget utilization (billed ÷ budget, formatted as a percentage) into columns A through E — skip projects with no budget set
Projects span multiple clients and you need to group them
If you want to view by client rather than by project:
Fetch all active FreshBooks projects, sort by client name ascending, then by project name ascending, and write project name, client name, budget, and billed amount into columns A through D
Full margin dashboard in one pass
If the quarterly deck needs this ready to present with the highest-risk projects flagged:
Pull all active FreshBooks projects with budget utilization above 90%, sort by utilization descending, write project name, client name, budget, billed amount, and utilization percentage into columns A through E — after the last row, add a summary row with totals for columns C and D
Asking for the filter, the sort, and the summary total in one prompt means you open the sheet and it's ready.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open the Google Sheet you're using to build your quarterly margin view — then ask it to pull your active FreshBooks projects with budgets and billed amounts in a single pass. For a related workflow, see how to export the FreshBooks client list for collections triage or the FreshBooks overview.