The Scenario
It is Thursday afternoon. You manage eight contractors across three agency clients, and every one of them bills by the hour. You have always trusted WakaTime to be the source of truth — it runs silently in every editor, it never lies, and it does not depend on anyone remembering to start a timer. What it does not do is put its data in the same sheet as your invoice review checklist.
The bad version:
- You log into WakaTime, navigate to each contractor's account or pull the team summary, and export a CSV for the 30-day billing period.
- You open the CSV in a separate tab, manually copy the rows for the relevant projects, and paste them into the billing sheet — then spend 20 minutes renaming columns that never match the headers you set up last quarter.
- You repeat this for each contractor and reconcile any discrepancy in project naming by hand, because WakaTime calls the project "acme-redesign" and your sheet calls it "Acme Web."
Your billing deadline is end of day Friday, and this reconciliation work is not what you were hired to do. That time belongs on something that actually earns the agency money.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
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 WakaTime integration it pulls coding summaries directly — no CSV export, no column renaming, no tab-switching.
Open your billing sheet and paste this prompt:
Pull WakaTime coding summaries for the last 30 days and paste them into this sheet with columns: Date, Project, Language, Hours — one row per day per project per language
What You Get
- One row per unique date-project-language combination, written directly into the sheet starting at the next empty row.
- Column headers: Date, Project, Language, Hours — exactly as requested.
- Project names come through as WakaTime recorded them, so you can use a VLOOKUP against your client mapping column to normalize names in one additional step.
- If a date range returns zero entries for a project, that project simply does not appear — no blank rows to clean up.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
The date range is a cell reference, not a typed range
Your billing sheet already has start and end dates in B1 and B2. Rather than typing dates into the prompt:
Fetch WakaTime coding summaries for the date range in B1:B2 and fill this sheet with Date, Project, Language, Hours — one row per day per project per language
The project names do not match your client list
Your sheet has canonical client names in column A. WakaTime uses internal project slugs that differ:
Pull WakaTime coding summaries for the last 30 days. For each row, check if the project name appears in column A and write the matched client name in column C, or "Unmatched" if there is no match. Fill columns D, E, F with Date, Language, Hours.
You only want hours above a threshold
You bill a minimum of 0.5 hours per entry. Anything shorter gets rolled up:
Fetch WakaTime summaries for the last 30 days, drop any rows where Hours is under 0.5, and paste the remaining rows into this sheet with columns: Date, Project, Language, Hours
Clean names, filter short sessions, and flag missing projects in one shot
Pull WakaTime summaries for the last 30 days. Drop rows where Hours is under 0.5. For each remaining row, look up the project name against column A and write the canonical client name in a new Client column, or "REVIEW" if not found. Paste the final table into this sheet starting at row 5 with columns: Date, Client, Project, Language, Hours — sorted by Client then Date.
The pattern: ask for the filtering and the normalization in the same prompt so you arrive at a reviewable table rather than a raw dump.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open the billing sheet you run every month — ask it to pull last month's WakaTime summaries by project and language, and it will write the table without you touching a CSV. See also how to generate a client billing report from WakaTime in a Google Sheet, or go back to the WakaTime integration overview.