The Scenario
You are a team manager at a 60-person engineering department. Your busiest quarter starts in three weeks. Before the sprint planning meeting on Monday, you need to know who has approved time off during that period — names, dates, hours — so you can plan coverage before people are already gone.
The data is in Gusto. Getting it into a usable format before Monday is the problem.
The slow version:
- Log into Gusto and navigate to Time Off
- Try to filter to pending requests for your team
- Export what you can, or start copying and pasting
- Realize the export does not filter by department, so you have the whole company's requests
- Manually remove the rows for people who are not on your team
- It is Sunday and you are cleaning a spreadsheet instead of preparing for sprint planning.
The fast version is one prompt.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI pulls the time-off request data from Gusto and writes it into the sheet in the format you need — filtered, sorted, and ready for coverage planning.
Open the SheetXAI sidebar and type:
Fetch all pending Gusto time-off requests for my company and write employee name, time-off type, start date, end date, and status into this sheet — one row per request. Sort by start date ascending.
SheetXAI calls Gusto's time-off API, pulls all pending requests, and writes them into the sheet — sorted by start date so you can see the nearest requests first.
What You Get
A pending time-off ledger with the columns you need for coverage planning:
- Employee name — first and last
- Time-off type — PTO, sick, holiday, or whatever your company uses
- Start date — when the leave begins
- End date — when the leave ends
- Status — pending, approved, or denied
Sorted by start date. You can see at a glance who is out first, who overlaps with your critical delivery dates, and where you have gaps that need coverage.
If you want only your specific team's requests, you filter by the employee names you know, or you ask SheetXAI to cross-reference against a list of your team members in a separate column.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Time-off data for coverage planning has common complications — requests that overlap, employees whose requests span weekends, policy types you want to treat differently.
When you need to flag requests that overlap with a specific project deadline
Your team has a hard delivery date on June 15. You want to know which requests overlap with the two weeks before that date.
Fetch all pending Gusto time-off requests for my company. Write employee name, time-off type, start date, end date, and status to this sheet. Add an "Overlap" column — write "YES" for any request where the start or end date falls between June 1 and June 15. Leave blank otherwise. Sort by start date.
When you only want requests for employees on your team
You have a list of your team members in the Team tab, column A. You only want to see their time-off requests.
Fetch all pending Gusto time-off requests for my company. Filter to only the employees listed in the Team tab column A. Write employee name, time-off type, start date, end date, and hours requested to this sheet. Sort by start date.
When hours requested are not filled in and you need to estimate coverage impact
Some requests show days, not hours. You need to estimate hours for coverage planning.
Fetch all pending Gusto time-off requests. Write employee name, time-off type, start date, end date, hours requested, and status to this sheet. For any request where hours is blank, calculate estimated hours based on 8 hours per weekday between start and end date and write that to the hours column with a note "(estimated)." Sort by start date.
When you need to combine pending requests with a project staffing plan to see coverage gaps
Your staffing plan is in the Staffing tab — each row is a project milestone with a required headcount and a date. You want to see how many of your team will be available for each milestone given pending time-off.
Fetch all pending Gusto time-off requests for the employees in column A of the Team tab. Cross-reference against the milestone dates in the Staffing tab column B and the required headcount in column C. For each milestone, calculate how many team members are unavailable due to approved time-off and write "Available: X / Required: Y" next to each milestone. Write the full time-off list to this sheet and the milestone coverage analysis to the Coverage tab.
The pattern: instead of a separate export and a separate staffing analysis, you describe the combined coverage view and SheetXAI builds it in one pass.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open a blank sheet, then ask it to pull your pending Gusto time-off requests. The Gusto integration is included in every SheetXAI plan. For related workflows, see how to export the department org structure for planning or the Gusto in Google Sheets overview.