The Scenario
The project coordinator got a list from the client services team: 20 project IDs that wrapped up in March and need to be archived in Timely before the end of the week. Active projects clutter the dashboard and make it harder for project managers to find what they're actually working on. The list is already in column A of a Google Sheet.
The bad version:
- Open Timely, search for the first project ID, open the project, find the archive option, confirm
- Go back to the search, find the next project ID, open it, archive it
- Repeat 18 more times while keeping one eye on the sheet to track which ones you've done
There is no batch archive option in the Timely UI. Twenty projects means twenty separate UI operations. By the tenth one you're skipping the confirmation prompt without reading it.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent that lives inside your Google Sheet. It reads your sheet and through its built-in Timely integration it can update all 20 projects in a single operation — no UI navigation, no manual searching.
For every project ID in column A of my Archive Queue tab, update the Timely project to set it as archived — write the result into column B
What You Get
- Timely receives an update call for each project ID in column A
- Column B fills with the result: "archived" if successful, or an error message if the ID wasn't found or the project was already archived
- All 20 projects updated in one pass
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Some project IDs in column A are invalid or blank
For each non-empty row in column A of my Archive Queue tab, update the Timely project to archived — skip blank rows and write the result into column B, flagging any ID that returned an error
You also need to rename the projects with a suffix to mark them as closed
For each row in my Archive Queue tab: update the Timely project with the ID in column A to archived, and rename it by appending " (Closed Q1 2025)" to the existing name — write the updated name into column B and the result into column C
Some projects need to be renamed but not archived
For each row in my Update Queue tab: update the Timely project with the ID in column A — set the name from column B and the billable status from column C — write the result into column D
Full project cleanup in one pass
In my Archive Queue tab: for rows where column C says "archive," set the Timely project to archived. For rows where column C says "rename," update the project name using column B. Write the result for each row into column D and flag any failures in column E.
The pattern: combine the conditional logic and the update in one prompt so you're not making two passes through the sheet manually.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open the sheet with your project update list, then ask it to push the changes to Timely. For pulling the full project list first, see the spoke on exporting the Timely project list.