The Scenario
You are the executive director of a nonprofit. Board meeting is in three weeks and the finance committee wants a full recurring-giving retention report: every active recurring plan, the donor behind it, the amount, the frequency, and the estimated annual value.
Givebutter has 120 active recurring plans. You have never pulled this data into a sheet before.
The slow version:
- Navigate to Givebutter's recurring plans section
- Scroll through the list, click each plan, note the donor name, amount, frequency
- Open a spreadsheet, type each record in by hand
- Realize halfway through that "monthly $25" and "annual $300" are not directly comparable without calculating annualized value
- Get to plan 74, run out of time before the committee prep call, hand the ED a half-finished sheet.
The fast version is one prompt.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent inside your spreadsheet that fetches all your recurring plans from Givebutter, formats them, and computes the annual value in one go.
Open the SheetXAI sidebar and type:
Fetch all recurring giving plans from Givebutter and write them into this sheet with columns: plan ID, donor name, email, amount, frequency, start date, and estimated annual value. Calculate estimated annual value as amount × payments per year (monthly = 12, quarterly = 4, annual = 1, weekly = 52). Sort by estimated annual value descending.
SheetXAI calls Givebutter's API, pulls all 120 active plans, computes the annual value per plan, and writes the full list sorted by estimated value. The board's recurring-giving report is ready before you leave the office.
What You Get
A complete recurring plan report with:
- 120 plans — all active, nothing missed
- Plan ID, donor name, email, amount, frequency, start date — the full record
- Estimated annual value per plan — calculated correctly per frequency
- Sorted by annual value descending — your most valuable recurring donors at the top
The finance committee has the retention picture they asked for without anyone clicking through 120 individual plan records.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Recurring plan exports have a few common wrinkles.
When frequency values are inconsistently stored in Givebutter
Some plans come back as "monthly," others as "MONTHLY," others as "month." The annualized calculation breaks if the values are not normalized.
Fetch all Givebutter recurring plans. Normalize the frequency column so all variations of monthly read as 'monthly', quarterly as 'quarterly', and so on. Then calculate estimated annual value per plan and write everything into this sheet sorted by annual value descending.
When you want to segment active versus paused plans
Not every plan in Givebutter is truly active. Some may be paused.
Fetch all Givebutter recurring plans. Separate active plans onto a tab called 'Active' and paused plans onto a tab called 'Paused'. For the Active tab, include the standard columns plus estimated annual value. For the Paused tab, include plan ID, donor name, and the date the plan was paused.
When you want to show the top 10 recurring donors for the board letter
The ED wants to personally acknowledge the top 10 recurring donors by annual value in the board report.
Fetch all Givebutter recurring plans. Identify the top 10 by estimated annual value (amount × payments per year). Write just those 10 into this sheet with donor name, email, plan amount, frequency, and annual value. Format the annual value column as currency.
When you need recurring plan data combined with total one-time giving for a full donor value picture
The retention report should show not just recurring value but total lifetime giving per donor, so the committee can see who the true high-value donors are.
Fetch all Givebutter recurring plans and list them in this sheet with the standard columns plus estimated annual value. For each recurring donor, also pull their total one-time giving from Givebutter and write it into a column called 'One-Time Lifetime Total'. Add a final column called 'Total Estimated Annual Value' that sums the recurring annual value and one-time lifetime total divided by years since first gift.
The pattern: the first prompt gets the data out; the fuller prompts combine it with context from the rest of Givebutter so the board sees the complete picture.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and ask it to pull your Givebutter recurring plans into a sheet. The Givebutter integration is included in every plan. For related workflows, see how to export donation transactions into a sheet or the Givebutter in Google Sheets overview.