The Scenario
You are an HR manager at a 120-person company. Annual compensation review is next week. Your VP of HR wants a working spreadsheet — every active employee, their department, job title, hire date, and pay type — by tomorrow morning.
Gusto has all of it. The problem is getting it out in a usable format.
The slow version:
- Log into Gusto and navigate to the employee reports section
- Download the default employee export CSV
- Open it in Google Sheets and discover 40 columns you do not need and 3 you do not have
- Strip the irrelevant columns manually
- Fix the hire date formatting because it came out as a Unix timestamp
- Sort by department, which requires a manual sort pass
- You spend two hours on data prep before the actual compensation review starts.
The fast version is one prompt.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent inside your spreadsheet. It connects directly to Gusto and writes the data you asked for, in the shape you asked for, without you touching a CSV.
Open the SheetXAI sidebar and type:
List all employees from Gusto and write them to this sheet — include first name, last name, email, department, job title, hire date, and employment status. Sort by department, then by last name within each department.
SheetXAI calls Gusto, pulls the active employee roster, applies the sort, and writes the results into the sheet. No extra columns. No timestamp formatting issues. Sorted exactly the way you described.
What You Get
A clean roster sheet with exactly the columns you specified:
- First name and last name — one column each, no combined field to split
- Email — for follow-up communication during the review cycle
- Department — clean name, not an internal ID
- Job title — from the Gusto employee record
- Hire date — formatted as a date, not a timestamp
- Employment status — active, inactive, or on leave
The sort is applied before the data lands. You open the sheet and it is ready to use, not ready to be cleaned.
If you need compensation amounts added, you ask in the same prompt. If you want only active full-time employees and not part-time, you say so.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Real company data is rarely clean. SheetXAI handles data quirks and analysis in the same prompt.
When department names are inconsistent
Some employees have "Engineering" and some have "Eng" or "Software Engineering" in Gusto because of how they were entered during different hiring phases.
List all employees from Gusto and write them to this sheet with first name, last name, department, job title, and hire date. Normalize department names — treat "Eng," "Engineering," and "Software Engineering" as "Engineering." Sort by normalized department, then last name.
When you need to flag employees hired in the last 90 days
New hires should get a different compensation band during review. You want them flagged before anyone touches the data.
Pull all active Gusto employees into this sheet with name, department, job title, hire date, and pay type. Add a column called "New Hire Flag" — mark "Yes" for any employee hired in the last 90 days, "No" for everyone else.
When pay type is mixed across compensation models
Some employees are salaried, some are hourly. The compensation review treats them differently, and you want them separated.
Export all active Gusto employees to this sheet. Include name, department, job title, hire date, pay type, and compensation rate. Split the output into two sections — salaried employees first, then hourly employees — with a header row for each section.
When you also need contractor headcount for the same review
The VP of HR wants employees and contractors together in one sheet so the total headcount picture is complete.
Pull all active Gusto employees into columns A through G with name, email, department, title, hire date, pay type, and "Employee" in a Type column. Then pull all active Gusto contractors into the same sheet below the last employee row with name, email, type of work, start date, and "Contractor" in the Type column. Add a summary row at the top showing total employee count and total contractor count.
The pattern: instead of running two separate exports and pasting them together, you ask for both in one prompt. The sheet is analysis-ready from the start.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open any blank sheet, then ask it to pull your Gusto employee roster. The Gusto integration is included in every SheetXAI plan. For related workflows, see how to bulk-update compensation in Gusto from a sheet or the Gusto in Google Sheets overview.