The Scenario
The project phase just closed. Your consulting agency tracks billable hours in a Google Sheet — task ID in column A, start time in column B, end time in column C, billable flag in column D, and completion percentage in column E. There are 200 rows covering six weeks of work across three client projects.
The client invoice goes out Monday. OneDesk worklogs need to be in the system before then so the billing report can be generated on the client's end too.
The bad version:
- Open OneDesk, navigate to the first task, click Add Worklog, and enter start time, end time, and billable flag manually
- Repeat for all 200 rows across three projects, context-switching between the sheet and OneDesk each time
- For any row where column B or C has a time format that doesn't match what OneDesk's form accepts, pause, figure out the right format, re-enter it, and continue
Column E — completion percentage — is supposed to update the task's completion status in OneDesk too. That's an extra field on each worklog. So it's not four fields per row, it's five. Two hundred times.
You have other deliverables to close before end of day. This kind of data entry is not what the client is paying for and it's not what you were hired to do.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent that lives inside your Google Sheet. It reads the timesheet and, through its built-in OneDesk integration, creates every worklog entry in one pass.
Create a OneDesk worklog for every row in the Timesheets sheet — use column A as the item ID, column B as start time, column C as finish time, mark the entry as billable if column D says yes, and use column E as the completion percentage. Write "success" or the error message into column F.
Two hundred rows. One prompt. Column F tells you exactly which ones need a second look.
What You Get
- A OneDesk worklog created for each row in the Timesheets sheet
- Billable flag set conditionally based on column D
- Completion percentage passed from column E
- Column F populated with success confirmation or the specific error for any row that failed
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Start and end times are in a format OneDesk doesn't accept
Your sheet has times like "9:30 AM" and "2:45 PM" but OneDesk expects ISO 8601 datetime strings.
Create OneDesk worklogs from the Timesheets sheet: item ID from column A, start time from column B, end time from column C — convert all times to ISO 8601 format using today's date as the date component. Mark billable if column D says yes. Write success or error into column F.
Some rows have no end time — only total hours worked
A portion of the sheet has start time in column B but column C is blank. Column E has total hours instead.
Create OneDesk worklogs from the Timesheets sheet. For rows where column C has a finish time, use start and finish. For rows where column C is blank, use column B as start time and add the hours from column E to calculate the end time. Mark billable if column D says yes. Write result into column F.
The task IDs in column A span multiple OneDesk projects
Some task IDs belong to Project Alpha, some to Project Beta. The project context matters for where the worklog lands.
Create OneDesk worklogs from the Timesheets sheet: item ID from column A, start from column B, end from column C, billable from column D. In column G, note which OneDesk project each task ID belongs to as reported by the API. Write success or error into column F.
Full billing close in one pass
Time format normalization, missing end-time calculation, billable flag handling, and a final summary of hours logged per project.
Create OneDesk worklogs from the Timesheets sheet. Item ID from column A. Start time from column B (convert to ISO 8601). End time from column C (convert to ISO 8601; if blank, calculate from column E hours). Mark billable if column D says yes. Write success or error into column F. After all rows are processed, add a summary at the bottom of the sheet showing total rows submitted, total hours logged, total billable hours, and a breakdown by project.
One prompt. The billing close is done before the client expects it.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open the timesheet you need to push into OneDesk before the invoice goes out — ask it to create all the worklogs, handle the time formatting, and give you a failure log. Also worth reading: how to pull a billable hours summary back from OneDesk into a sheet, and the hub overview of all four methods for connecting OneDesk to Google Sheets.