The Problem With Getting Sheet Data In and Out of Timelink
You have a Google Sheet full of data — employee lists with person IDs, project codes, time entries you've exported for payroll review. You need it pushed into Timelink, or pulled back out, in a way that doesn't take an afternoon every time.
Timelink is good at recording work hours across both software and hardware time-tracking setups. But moving data between it and your spreadsheet is more work than it should be. The usual flow is exporting a CSV from Timelink, opening it in Sheets, doing your analysis, then re-entering the results back into Timelink by hand.
Below are the four common ways teams handle this. Only the last one scales.
Method 1: Manual Copy-Paste
The default. Open your sheet, find the rows you care about — person IDs for off-boarding, project codes for billing review — copy them, switch to Timelink, and enter each one. Or the reverse: export from Timelink, open the CSV in Sheets, work through it.
When this works: one-off cleanup, fewer than 10 records, no recurring schedule.
When it breaks: anything recurring, anything that touches 20 or more records at once, anything where you need to act on the whole list rather than each row in isolation. One miskeyed person ID and the wrong record gets deleted. One session timeout and you start over.
Method 2: Zapier or Make
Wire up Zapier or Make to watch your sheet. When a new row appears, the automation triggers an action in Timelink — creating a person, updating a project, or firing a deletion request. Or the reverse: when something changes in Timelink, write a row back to your sheet.
This works for event-driven moments: one new hire added, one record to create, one status change to log.
This fails for batch and analytical work: anything that operates on a list of 15 records at once, anything that needs to evaluate conditions before acting (skip rows marked "active", only include rows where the off-boarding date is past), anything where the schema changes. You also pay per task, and the costs add up fast once you chain steps.
Method 3: The Previous Generation — Connector Add-Ons
Until recently, the best option for repeatable spreadsheet ↔ Timelink workflows was a category of add-ons that let you manually configure field mappings and saved templates. You picked your range, tagged your columns, saved a config, ran it.
That was a real step up from copy-paste. Output was consistent, configs were reusable, the team didn't have to redo formatting every run.
But you were still responsible for the template design, the field mapping, the schedule, the conditional logic about which rows to include, the handling of errors mid-run. The tool got the data through, but the thinking was still on you. And the moment your sheet structure changed, your config broke until someone went back in and fixed it.
This is the previous generation. It worked, but it asked a lot of the operator.
The Easy Way: Using SheetXAI in Google Sheets
There is a different way entirely. SheetXAI is an AI agent that lives inside your Google Sheet. It reads the sheet, understands what you are looking at, and through its built-in Timelink integration it can push to or pull from Timelink for you. No template configuration, no automation glue, no re-entering data by hand. You just ask.
Example 1: Bulk-delete offboarded employee records using a column of person IDs
For every person ID in column A of my "Offboarded" tab, delete that person record from Timelink — all 15 at once.
SheetXAI reads the column, fires the delete request for each ID in sequence, and reports back which records were removed and whether any failed.
Example 2: Summarize hours by project code and write results back to the sheet
Pull all time entries from Timelink for project codes listed in column B, sum the hours per code, and write the totals into column C.
The pattern: instead of exporting first and then summarizing, you ask for both in one prompt. SheetXAI handles the fetch, the aggregation, and the writeback inline.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open any Google Sheet with Timelink data, then ask it to do one of the tasks above. The Timelink integration is included in every SheetXAI plan.