The Scenario
Payroll runs Friday. Your payroll administrator needs all time registrations for the past month from Rentman — crew name, project, date, hours worked, and activity type — to calculate freelancer payments before the bank transfer deadline.
It's Wednesday afternoon. The time registration data is in Rentman. The payroll sheet is a template with column headers and nothing else.
The bad version:
- Export the time registration report from Rentman, get a CSV with 340 rows
- Open it and find the crew name column contains the internal crew ID, not the name — that's in a separate contacts export
- Merge the two CSVs by crew ID in Sheets using VLOOKUP, realize 18 rows have a crew ID format mismatch that breaks the lookup
The bank transfer is Friday. Wednesday afternoon is not the time to be debugging VLOOKUP format mismatches.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent inside your Google Sheet. It reads the sheet structure, connects to Rentman, and can pull time registration records — with crew names resolved, not IDs — in a single pull.
Export all Rentman time registrations from the past 30 days and write crew member name, project name, date, and total hours into columns A through D starting at row 2
What You Get
- Column A: crew member full name (resolved, not the ID)
- Column B: project name the hours were logged against
- Column C: date of the registration
- Column D: total hours worked (numeric)
- Filtered to the past 30 days
- One row per time registration entry, ready for summing by crew name
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
You need activity type to split billable from non-billable hours
Pull all Rentman time registrations from the past 30 days and write crew name, project name, date, total hours, and activity type into columns A through E
You need a subtotal per crew member for the payment calculation
Fetch all Rentman time registrations for the past 30 days, write the full detail into columns A through D, then below the last row add a subtotal section with each unique crew member name and their total hours for the period
Some crew members were on multiple projects — show each project on a separate row but subtotal by crew member
Pull all time registrations from the past 30 days, write crew name, project name, date, and hours into columns A through D, and below the data section add a crew summary with name and total hours across all projects
Full payroll kill chain: fetch hours, calculate gross payment using rate from column F of a crew rate sheet, flag anyone over 160 hours
Fetch all Rentman time registrations for the past 30 days, write crew name and total hours per crew member into Sheet2 columns A and B, look up each crew member's day rate from Sheet1 column F (matched on name in Sheet1 column A), calculate gross payment as total hours divided by 8 times the day rate and put it in Sheet2 column C, and flag any crew member over 160 hours with REVIEW in column D
One prompt closes the gap between time records and payroll figures.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open the payroll template — then ask it to pull the Rentman time registrations for the period you need. If you're also building the crew rate reference sheet, the crew roster spoke covers pulling those records.