How to Connect Timely to Google Sheets (4 Methods Compared)

The Problem With Getting Sheet Data In and Out of Timely

You have a Google Sheet full of data — client names waiting to be onboarded, 200 rows of historical time entries, a list of project IDs that need archiving. Timely needs to know about all of it. The default path is to open Timely, find the right section, and start clicking through one record at a time while your spreadsheet sits open in another tab for reference.

Timely is excellent at automatic time capture — it tracks activity across apps and calendars and turns it into usable timesheets without requiring manual input. But getting bulk data into or out of it still runs through the UI, and the UI was built for one record at a time. The usual flow is: export a CSV from Timely, open it in Sheets, do your analysis, update your source sheet, then manually rekey anything that needs to go back.

Below are the four ways teams handle this. Only the last one actually scales.

Method 1: Manual Copy-Paste

Open Timely, navigate to the section you need — clients, projects, users, time entries — and start copying data into your sheet cell by cell. Or export a CSV and spend ten minutes reformatting the columns to match what the rest of your workflow expects.

Going the other direction is worse. If you have 35 new clients to create in Timely, you click "New client," type the name, pick a color, save, click "New client" again. For 35 rows. If you have 200 historical time entries to back-fill during a migration, each one is a separate form.

The first five entries feel manageable. The fifteenth starts to feel mechanical. By the thirtieth you're making typos and second-guessing whether you already did that row.

Method 2: Zapier or Make

Timely has connector options in both Zapier and Make. You can wire up a trigger — a new row in a sheet, a schedule, an incoming webhook — and push data to or from Timely automatically.

Before you go further: do you know what a trigger is in automation terms? A webhook? Field mapping? OAuth scopes? If those concepts feel unfamiliar, this path is going to take longer than you want it to. Skip to Method 3 or 4 — you'll get where you're going faster.

If you're still reading, the setup is real but fiddly: authenticate the Timely connector, pick the right action (create client, create event, list projects), map each field from your sheet to the corresponding Timely field, and test the run. The workflow runs. The problem is the edges.

Automation triggers fire one row at a time.

If you need to back-fill 200 time entries, that's 200 trigger fires, 200 API calls, and a task history that becomes genuinely hard to debug when row 147 returns a validation error and the rest keep running.

You probably just need the clients created, or the entries exported, and you have no idea how to build a Zap from scratch. So you push the ask to whoever on your team handles automations — and now you're waiting on Slack for them to finish something that wasn't on their list this week.

Cost scales fast once you add steps: conditional logic, error handling, retry behavior. Each one is another node.

Method 3: The Previous Generation — Connector Add-Ons

Until recently, the standard approach for repeatable spreadsheet-to-Timely workflows was a category of add-ons that let you configure column mappings and save them as reusable templates. You defined your range, labeled your fields, saved the config, and ran it on demand.

That was a real improvement over copy-paste. The output was consistent, the template was reusable, and your team didn't have to reformat anything each time.

But you were still the one responsible for designing the mapping, deciding which rows to include, handling the column rename when Timely updated its export format, and rebuilding the config whenever your sheet structure changed. The tool moved the data. The thinking was still entirely on you. And every schema change in either direction meant someone had to go back in and repair the template before the next run.

This was the previous generation. It got the job done but it asked a lot of the operator.

The Easy Way: Using SheetXAI in Google Sheets

There is a different approach entirely. SheetXAI is an AI agent that lives inside your Google Sheet. It reads your sheet, understands what you're looking at, and through its built-in Timely integration it can push data to Timely or pull data back for you. No template to configure, no automation to build, no reformatting by hand. You describe what you want.

Example 1: Create all clients from column A in one shot

Create a Timely client for every name in column A of my Clients tab — all 35 at once, using the color codes in column B

Timely receives 35 create-client calls. The results land back in column C — one confirmation or error per row, so you can see exactly which ones succeeded.

Example 2: Export last month's billable time entries

Pull all billable Timely events from March 1 to March 31 into my Billing tab with columns for user, project, hours, and billable status

The entries land in your sheet one row per event. No CSV export, no column reformatting. You ask once and the data is there.

Try It

Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open any Google Sheet with client lists, project IDs, or time entry data, then ask it to push to or pull from Timely. The Timely integration is included in every SheetXAI plan.