The Scenario
The quarterly budget review is Thursday. The head of finance asked you to put together a category-level spend breakdown from Mercury — not the raw transaction list, but total spend per category, sorted from largest to smallest, so the leadership team can see where the money went in Q2. You've done this before using a pivot table built on a Mercury CSV export. The last time you ran it, the export had 340 rows, three of which had blank category fields that broke the pivot, and you spent 20 minutes cleaning the data before you could build the summary.
The bad version:
- Export Q2 transactions from Mercury, open in Sheets, clean blank categories
- Build a pivot table with category as rows and sum of amount as values
- Discover that Mercury uses slightly different category names across different account types and spend another 10 minutes normalizing them
The quarterly review is not optional and the CFO doesn't want to see a pivot table being built live on a screenshare.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent that lives inside your Google Sheet. It connects to Mercury and can pull transactions, group them by category, and write a summary table — all in one pass, without a CSV in the middle.
Pull all Mercury transactions with status 'sent' from the last 90 days, write them into Sheet1 with date, description, amount, and category, then in Sheet2 write a unique list of categories with total spend per category sorted largest to smallest
What You Get
- Sheet1: raw transaction data — one row per transaction with date, description, amount, and Mercury category
- Sheet2: category summary — unique category names in column A, total spend per category in column B, sorted descending by spend
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Some transactions have blank categories — I need them grouped as 'Uncategorized'
Pull all Mercury transactions from Q2 2025 into Sheet1 with date, description, amount, and category — replace any blank category values with 'Uncategorized' — then in Sheet2 write the category spend summary sorted largest to smallest
I want a month-by-category breakdown, not just a category total
Fetch all Mercury transactions from the current calendar year and group by month and Mercury category in this Google Sheet — rows are months, columns are categories, values are total spend
Show spend by category compared to last quarter
Pull Mercury transactions from Q1 2025 into Sheet1 and Q2 2025 into Sheet2, each with date, description, amount, and category, then in Sheet3 write a category comparison: column A is category, column B is Q1 total, column C is Q2 total, column D is the difference
Full budget review prep in one shot: raw data, category summary, top 5 categories flagged
Pull all Mercury transactions with status 'sent' from Q2 2025, write raw data into Sheet1 with date, description, amount, and category, write a category spend summary sorted descending into Sheet2, and in Sheet3 write only the top 5 categories by spend labeled 'Top Spend Areas'
The budget review slide writes itself when the summary is already built in the format the deck needs.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open your quarterly budget Google Sheet, then ask it to pull Mercury transactions and build the category breakdown. For pulling the full raw transaction export before running the summary, see the transaction export spoke.