The Scenario
You are three weeks into a Timely migration for a consulting firm that tracked time manually for two years. The spreadsheet log has 200 rows: project ID, user, date, start time, end time, and a note column. Every one of those rows needs to exist as a Timely time entry before the firm can go live. The person who handed you this job said "it should only take a few hours."
The bad version:
- Open Timely, click "Log time," select the project from the dropdown, set the date, enter the start and end time, type the note, save
- Switch back to the sheet, find your place in row 2, switch back to Timely, repeat
- Reach row 40 and realize that at this pace, the 200-row migration will take the rest of the day
Nobody hired you to be a data entry operator. The value of your time on this project is in verifying the data is correct, not in clicking through 200 form submissions.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent that lives inside your Google Sheet. It reads your migration log and through its built-in Timely integration it can create all 200 time entries in a single operation — no UI, no clicking, no switching tabs.
Create Timely time entries in bulk from my Migration Log tab — use project ID from column A, user from column B, date from column C, start time from column D, end time from column E, and note from column F for all 200 rows
What You Get
- Timely receives a create-event call for each row in the migration log
- Column G fills with the result: the new event ID if successful, an error message if something failed (invalid project ID, user not found, overlapping time range)
- You can re-run the prompt filtering to only rows where column G is empty — catching any that failed the first pass
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Dates are in a non-standard format
In my Migration Log tab, convert all dates in column C from DD/MM/YYYY to YYYY-MM-DD, then create Timely time entries for all 200 rows using project ID in column A, user in column B, converted date in column C, and hours in column D
Some rows are missing a project ID
Create Timely time entries from my Migration Log tab for all rows where column A is not empty — skip blank rows, use column A for project ID, column B for user, column C for date, and column D for hours — write the result into column E
User names need to be matched to Timely user IDs
In my Migration Log tab: look up each name in column B against my User Map tab which has names in column A and Timely user IDs in column B — use the matched ID to create each Timely time entry with project ID from column A, matched user ID, date from column C, and hours from column D
Full migration validation and create in one shot
In my Migration Log tab: skip any row where column A or column B is blank, convert dates in column C from DD/MM/YYYY to ISO format, look up user IDs from the User Map tab, then create a Timely time entry for each valid row — write the new event ID into column G and flag validation errors in column H
The pattern: do the data cleanup and the bulk create in a single prompt so you're not running two passes manually.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open your migration spreadsheet, then ask it to push all rows to Timely. For pulling existing time entries back into a sheet, see the spoke on exporting time entries by date range.