The Scenario
You are a personal finance coach who just finished onboarding a new client. The intake form the client filled out listed four spending categories they want to control — groceries, dining, entertainment, and subscriptions. They connected their accounts through MX and already have budget targets set in the platform. You want to show them, in the first coaching session, exactly how their actual spending from last month compared to those targets.
The client's intake says the session starts in 45 minutes.
The bad version:
- Call the MX list-budgets endpoint for the user to get all budget records — each one includes a category name, a budget amount, and an actual spend figure.
- Copy the data into your sheet by hand, column by column — category in A, budget in B, actual in C.
- Build a variance formula in column D that subtracts actual from budget, then manually format the cells where actual exceeds budget in a different color.
Forty-five minutes is technically enough. Except the budget API response uses a numeric category code, not a name, and you now need a second lookup call to resolve the human-readable category labels.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent that lives inside your Google Sheet. It connects to MX Technologies, pulls all budget records for the user, resolves category names, calculates variance, and writes the comparison table in one pass.
List all budgets for MX user USR-abc123 and write each budget's category name, budget amount, and actual spend amount to columns A, B, and C — in column D calculate variance as budget minus actual.
What You Get
- One row per budget category.
- Column A: category name (human-readable, not numeric code).
- Column B: budget target amount.
- Column C: actual spend for the current period as reported by MX.
- Column D: variance (budget minus actual — negative means overspent).
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
You want overspent categories flagged automatically
List all budgets for MX user USR-abc123 and write category name, budget amount, actual spend, and variance to columns A through D — in column E write "Over" if actual spend exceeds budget, "On Track" otherwise.
Budget categories returned by MX include some you don't want to show the client
List all budgets for MX user USR-abc123 and write category, budget, actual, and variance to columns A through D — exclude any category where the budget amount is zero and flag any category where actual spend is more than 110 percent of budget in column E.
You want to compare this month's budgets against last month's actuals stored in another tab
List all budgets for MX user USR-abc123 and write category name, budget, and current actual to columns A, B, C — in column D look up last month's actual from the Prior Month tab using category name as the key and show the change in actual spend month over month.
You want a complete budget review ready for a client: budgets, actuals, variance, month-over-month change, and a summary of categories most at risk
List all budgets for MX user USR-abc123 and write category, budget, actual, and variance to columns A through D — in column E flag "Over", "At Risk" (within 10 percent of budget), or "On Track" — in column F look up last month's actual from the Prior Month tab and show the change — in a Coaching Summary tab list the top three over-budget categories by absolute overage.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open any Google Sheet with your client's MX user GUID, then ask it to pull all budget targets and actual spend and flag overspent categories before your next coaching session. For tracking the savings goals set alongside those budgets, see the savings goals progress article.