AI prompts for Google Sheets and Excel work

A lot of small-business AI work starts and ends in a spreadsheet. These prompts take data you already keep in Google Sheets or Excel (sales, receipts, receivables, leads, schedules) and use an AI assistant to clean it, explain it or turn it into the next action.

44 free prompts across 12 categories. Each one links to the real-world example it is based on. Updated October 24, 2026

How to use these prompts

1. Paste a small sample of rows (with headers) first so the AI understands your columns.
2. Remove customer personal data you don't need before pasting a sheet into a chat tool.
3. Ask for formulas or a cleaned table you can paste back, not just an explanation.
4. ChatGPT and Claude can read uploaded .xlsx and .csv files directly, which is easier than pasting large tables.

The 44 prompts

• Automation script for a boring taskGet a small script that renames files, cleans spreadsheets, etc. · Coding · beginner
• Receipt photos to bookkeeping entriesSnap a receipt in a chat and get a clean bookkeeping entry, like a construction firm's WhatsApp agent that feeds QuickBooks and Google Sheets. · Finance · beginner
• Weekly staff schedule from your sales forecastBuild next week's shift schedule from staff availability, expected sales and overtime limits, like Toast's Scheduling Agent for restaurants, which Toast says cut overtime hours per employee by 41% in beta. · Operations · beginner
• Find local businesses already buying adsBuild a prospect list of businesses already advertising in your area, check that they actually serve your market and collect their published contact details, like the weekend agent John Apolinar set up with Hermes and ChatGPT/Codex for his local media company. · Sales · beginner
• Turn new newsletter subscribers into qualified pitchesCatch each new newsletter subscriber, research them against your ideal customer profile, and draft a personal pitch only for the ones you approve, like Sharyph's no-code Substack Subscriber Pitch Agent with one human approval checkpoint before anything sends. · Sales · intermediate
• Automate purchase-order accruals for closeHave an agent read your accrual SOP, chase PO owners for delivery dates, calculate time-proportional accruals, and park journal entries for review—like Rivian's Bedrock agents that removed over 15 days of manual close work per cycle. · Finance · advanced
• Have your AI assistant spot gaps in the AR report and ask the right person to fix themGive an AI assistant your accounts receivable aging report and invoice list, let it find where the totals don't agree, and have it draft a clear request to the colleague who owns the numbers. A consultancy head set up ChatGPT's Dot agent as an executive assistant named Hannah with its own company email, and shared an email where it asked a colleague to reconcile a USD 59,819.26 AR summary with a USD 68,523.21 invoice total, pointing out the USD 8,703.95 gap matched four new invoices dated 14 October. · Finance · beginner
• Find out why a store is missing its targets, not just which oneHave an agent line up each store's sales with what the team actually did, like which head-office messages were read, which tasks were finished and which trainings were completed, and turn that into coaching tips for the area manager. Retail tech company Zipline launched ZipCoach to do this for field leaders, for example showing a store is behind on a new product line because its team hasn't finished the training on it. · Operations · intermediate
• Have an agent watch your work apps and message you only when something needs youInstead of asking an assistant for things, let it come to you: a short morning brief from your email, calendar and chat, check-ins every few hours that only ping you when something really needs you, and drafts it prepares in the background but never sends, pays, signs or deletes without your OK. Anthropic opened a research preview of Claude Duet on Oct 21, 2026, a proactive agent app built for professionals and small business owners that works this way. · Personal Productivity · beginner
• Answer every catering or event inquiry fast, even when you're not thereRestaurants and venues lose catering and private-event bookings when inquiries sit until the owner is back in the building. One restaurant owner shared on Oct 21, 2026 that putting written checklists, event runbooks and an AI agent on every inquiry took catering from 1 or 2 bookings a month to 7 to 12. · Sales · beginner
• Plan your repair and service schedule across shops, parts and staff with a team of agentsRepair businesses lose days juggling which job goes where, which parts are on hand and who has capacity. Split the planning between specialist agents, one for the jobs, one for the work needed, one for each shop's capacity and one for suppliers, and let a final planner combine them while you approve the plan. Rolls-Royce described its Optimiser multi-agent system, built with Microsoft, on Oct 21, 2026: separate Engine, Workscope, Facility and Supplier agents help plan close to 1,500 engine shop visits a year, cutting a planning exercise that took four or five people about a week and helping reduce turnaround times. · Operations · intermediate
• Reprice your menu item by item, with separate in-store and delivery pricesRaising prices across a whole menu or product list takes days of comparing costs, what sells and what competitors charge. Give an AI assistant your current prices and your target, and have it suggest item-level changes you then check. In an Oct 20, 2026 OpenAI case study, Ted Taylor, who runs three Schlotzsky's and Cinnabon restaurants in New Mexico, cut his yearly repricing from about 5 days to 1-2 hours with ChatGPT Work, which also caught increases that would have made some items uncompetitive. · Business Strategy · beginner
• Catch up months of overdue bookkeeping by filing each vendor where your books already put itWhen the books are a year behind, the slow part is pulling every statement and deciding where thousands of transactions go. Let an AI do the sorting, but only by your own history: a vendor you've filed the same way before goes there again, and anything uncertain comes to you once and becomes a rule. In posts from Oct 15-20, 2026, Kris Collo described doing this for a friend's private school: an AI agent downloaded 15 months of bank and card statements and check images, loaded over 2,000 transactions into the free accounting app SlowBooks Pro overnight, filed vendors seen 3+ times in the same category 80% of the time, and sent only a few dozen to the general manager. The line-by-line pass also found a double-paid accounting fee and charges that kept running after being cancelled (his figures, unaudited). · Finance · intermediate
• Run your back office with a small team of bots that file email, track bids and log invoicesFor a contracting business, bid invites, supplier invoices and timesheet changes all arrive mixed into one inbox. Give each routine job to its own AI helper, keep every bid on one shared board, and make each helper log what it did so you can count it every week. On Oct 20, 2026, Monica Thomas of M&M Interiors posted the first 11 days (Oct 8-19) of her team of 13 bots running 46 routines: 2,773 emails filed, 892 junk emails deleted, 69 bid invites routed onto a board of 59 active jobs, 71 invoices processed and 75 timesheet edits checked and applied. Her next bot, an estimator, gets read-only access to past bids first. · Operations · advanced
• Brief your technicians before each job and let them talk through their notes afterward instead of typingField technicians lose time hunting for the right unit, the old service notes and the manual, then write up their report in the van. An AI assistant can brief them on the job before they arrive (which equipment, what the issue is, what tools to bring, past history) and, after the work, interview them by voice, asking follow-up questions until the notes are complete. Microsoft reported on Oct 22, 2026 that TK Elevator technicians now get this pre-visit briefing on their phone and dictate their work to a debriefing voice agent, and those spoken notes are shared with colleagues who service the same equipment later. TKE has 25,000 service technicians caring for 1.4 million elevators and escalators. · Operations · intermediate
• Read incoming quote requests by email, in any language, and draft a priced quote with the best route optionsFreight forwarders, couriers and other shipping businesses get a steady stream of loosely written quote requests by email, often in several languages, and someone has to work out the route, service level and price for each one. An AI agent can sort the requests, pull out the shipment details, compare route options and draft a full quote for a person to check, while unusual or high-value requests go straight to the sales team. Arab News reported on Oct 22, 2026 that Saudia Cargo's AI workers now classify multilingual email rate requests, calculate multi-leg options, pick service tiers such as pharma or fresh cargo, and prepare personalized quotes within seconds, with every action logged and complex cases escalated to people. · Sales · intermediate
• Pull every promise out of a client contract and turn it into an owned, dated checklist so nothing gets missedContracts and statements of work bury commitments such as reporting dates, staffing levels, service levels and penalties across dozens of pages, and missing one can cost money and reputation. AI agents can read each contract, list every obligation with the page it came from, assign an owner and due date, and flag clauses that conflict. Microsoft reported on Oct 21, 2026 that Birlasoft built a system of six specialist agents, coordinated by a planning agent, that extracts and validates obligations from more than 1,000 statements of work a year, finding over 10 obligations per project on average and saving about 4,000 person-hours a year, with people reviewing the results because the obligations carry financial and legal weight. · Legal & Compliance · intermediate
• Get a monthly keyword ranking report for each Amazon product in minutes instead of hours of exportsAmazon and Walmart sellers and the agencies that manage them spend days each month exporting keyword rankings and search volumes into spreadsheets to see what's slipping. An AI agent can pull those numbers together for each product and point out what changed and what to do next. Helium 10 reported on Oct 21, 2026 that ecommerce agency CoreTrex now asks its Helium agent for a ranking-shift and search-volume report per product (ASIN), cutting each report from 30 to 45 minutes down to 5 to 10, about 80% less time, so the team reviews keywords far more often and adjusts targeting and ad spend faster. · Ecommerce · beginner
• Adapt your training guides for each country and language you work in, not just translate them word for wordWhen a business grows into new cities or countries, its training guides, onboarding decks and how-to sheets often stay in one language with examples that don't fit local rules, money or habits, so new staff learn slower and make mistakes. An AI agent can rewrite each guide for a specific market: translate it, swap in local examples, flag rules that differ, and keep the format the same. TechCrunch reported on Oct 22, 2026 that Uber is rolling ChatGPT Work out to all of its roughly 30,000 employees after a 1,000-person pilot in which about 80% of users were non-engineers, and that pilot users used it for tasks including localizing training materials for different markets and languages, analyzing operations data to spot trends, and building personal dashboards. · HR & People · beginner
• Compare contractor quotes line by line on the same scope, so you spot what one quote left out before you signRenovation and building quotes rarely cover exactly the same work, so the cheapest one can hide missing items that show up later as extra charges. An AI assistant can read each quote PDF, line the items up against one shared scope, flag what's missing or priced very differently, and list the questions to ask each contractor. On Oct 22, 2026 the X user @fjrdomingues wrote that their agent compares contractor PDFs on the same scope for a renovation and caught a €22k gap. · Operations · beginner
• Find past job applicants who fit the role you're hiring for now and invite them backMost businesses already have strong runner-up candidates sitting in old applications, but nobody has time to dig through them when a new role opens. An AI assistant can compare your new job description against past applicants, shortlist the best matches with reasons, and draft a friendly re-engagement message for you to review. Paylocity launched Recruiting Optimizer on Oct 22, 2026, including a Talent Rediscovery Agent that identifies previous applicants who match current hiring needs, with recruiters setting the criteria and reviewing every output. · HR & People · beginner
• Build a loan amortization or depreciation workbook with real formulas and a clear assumptions tabLoan schedules, depreciation tables and balloon payment calculations eat hours of careful spreadsheet work and are easy to get wrong. An AI agent that can write and run code can read the loan agreement and build a spreadsheet with live formulas, a documented assumptions tab and notes for anything to follow up, ready for you to review instead of type. Accounting Today reported on Oct 22, 2026 that Thomson Reuters' new CoCounsel for Tax, Audit and Accounting built a full amortization table, balloon payment calculation and follow-up notes for a $5 million commercial real estate loan from the loan agreement and a template during a demo. · Finance · intermediate
• Ask why today's card payout is lower than today's sales and get a line-by-line answerCard terminals, delivery apps and payment processors rarely pay out exactly what you sold, and owners often end up comparing reports after closing to work out where the difference went. An AI assistant given your sales report and payout statement can walk through every gap: fees, refunds, chargebacks, tips, held funds and timing. Qashier launched QashierGM on Oct 23, 2026, an AI general manager for more than 25,000 Southeast Asian merchants that works from each shop's own transactions and settlements and can explain, line by line, why a payout is lower than the day's sales. · Finance · beginner
• Sort a month of customer calls by what callers wanted and how they felt, to find what is really driving themWhen customer scores drop, the phones usually show why, but nobody has time to listen to hundreds of calls. An AI assistant can read call transcripts or notes, tag each one by reason and mood, and show which single problem creates most of the calls, so you fix the cause instead of answering the same question faster. Numa's Oct 14, 2026 case study describes how Dyer Automotive Group in Florida pulled its own service calls and sorted them by reason and mood. 63% were customers checking on their cars and more than 40% of callers were angry, with "nobody called me back" the top complaint. Fixing callbacks brought call volume down and raised CSI. · Customer Support · beginner
• Check whether a new crop or farm venture will work on your land, with seed amounts and a startup budgetSwitching to a new crop or adding a farm product is a big bet, and many small growers have no agronomist or mentor to check the numbers first. An AI assistant can compare your soil, climate and water with what the crop needs, calculate seed or planting material for your plot, and draft an investment budget with the risks spelled out, so you know what to verify with local experts. Google's Oct 20, 2026 announcement of new Gemini tools for small businesses featured farmer Santosh Jadhav in Maharashtra, India, who used Gemini as a virtual agronomist to evaluate soil suitability, calculate precise seed requirements and draft an investment budget for a new ginger farm. · Business Strategy · beginner
• Check customer damage photos on return claims and flag pictures that were reused or copied from the webWhen a customer says an item arrived broken, most shops ask for a photo, then someone has to look at every picture, judge the damage and decide on a refund or replacement. An AI assistant can describe what each photo actually shows, check it against the product and the claim, and flag photos that look reused, stock-like or identical to another claim, so staff only spend time on the doubtful cases. At Salesforce's Dreamforce, Australian online retailer Kogan said (reported by iTnews on Oct 14, 2026) that its Agentforce customer service agent uses generative AI image recognition to assess transit damage in return cases, and that it now catches people who submit the same image across cases or a damaged-product picture found online. · Customer Support · beginner
• Test a customer support AI in "shadow mode" on real emails before it ever replies to a customerTurning on an AI support agent straight away is risky: it may give a wrong answer, or claim it did something it didn't. A safer way is shadow mode: for one or two weeks the AI drafts a reply to every real ticket as a private note only your team can see, people answer customers as usual, and you score the drafts to find holes in your help articles and rules before going live. Fini's Wefunder case study describes this rollout at the equity crowdfunding platform: Fini posted draft replies as internal comments in Front, the team corrected what was wrong, and the shadow period caught cases where the agent said it had done something it couldn't. After going live, response times fell from about 7 hours to about 25 minutes in week two. · Customer Support · beginner
• Write a personal email to every student from their grades: a nudge for those falling behind, praise for those doing wellA short personal note from a teacher can bring a struggling student back or keep a strong one motivated, but writing dozens of them by hand each week rarely happens. An AI assistant can read your gradebook export, sort students into groups (falling behind, missing work, improving, excelling) and draft a personal, encouraging email for each one that mentions their actual scores and one clear next step, which you review before sending. Hawkes Learning added an AI-powered Message Assistant to its Hawkes Teach instructor platform on Oct 21, 2026 that drafts individualized student emails from each student's scores, letting the instructor choose tone and intent and edit before sending. · Education · beginner
• Catch automations that say "success" but quietly do nothing: a weekly check that compares each workflow's runs against what it actually producedScheduled workflows can run without errors while producing nothing, because an input list ran out, a filter stopped matching or a source changed, and a green 'success' badge hides it for weeks. An AI assistant can take each automation's run history and output counts, flag runs that finished but produced zero or unusually few results, and suggest a simple alert so it can't happen silently again. Founder Joshua Pi'Rwot (FounderWise) posted on X on Oct 23, 2026 that his n8n lead workflow ran twice a day and reported success every time from Sept 16 to Oct 9, yet loaded zero new leads in those 23 days, because a date-keyed keyword list had run out of dates and an empty run still counted as a success. · Operations · beginner
• Turn a rental or property enquiry into a booked viewing: an AI clarifies what the client wants, shortlists only places that fit, answers objections and agrees times with the ownerGetting listings online is the easy part for a property agency; the time goes into each client: working out what they really need, picking the few places that fit, handling 'too far' or 'too pricey', and going back and forth with owners on dates, price and terms before anyone sees a property. An AI agent can run that whole back-and-forth in chat and hand your team a confirmed viewing, so a person only does the showing. Nick Irbitskii, director of Unicorn Property in Bali, posted on X (Oct 22, 2026) that their AI agent now clarifies each request (budget, dates, area, must-haves), builds a shortlist of only the villas that fit, handles objections, talks to the owner about check-in/check-out, price and terms, and books every viewing, while a human just shows the villa. · Sales · intermediate
• Be ready the moment a grant or funding window opens: have an AI prepare the application ahead of time, watch for the opening, and fill it in for you to check and submitMany grants and subsidy schemes open on a set day and close early once the money runs out, so a business that is busy, travelling or still gathering details can miss out entirely. An AI agent can work out which options fit your business weeks ahead, prepare every answer and field detail in advance, check for mismatches in your records, then watch the scheme's page and have the application ready to review within minutes of it opening. Farmers Weekly reported (Oct 22, 2026) that Staffordshire farmer Clive Bailye's AI agent, Giles, planned his Sustainable Farming Incentive options, spotted a discrepancy in one field parcel, monitored the government website and began filling in the application when the window opened at 10am while he was in London; he checked it on his phone and it was submitted by 11:09am, hours before the funding pot ran out at 3:48pm. · Business Strategy · intermediate
• Spot companies about to hire before they post the job: have an AI watch filings and announcements for hiring signals and draft outreach for you to approveRecruiters, agencies and B2B service firms win more work when they reach a company the moment it expands, not weeks later when the job ad is live and every competitor is calling. An AI agent can watch public company news, regulatory filings and job boards for signs a business is growing in your niche, match each signal to people or services you already have, and draft a short outreach note for you to check. Emergent reported (Oct 23, 2026) that Sydney recruiter Alicia Keenan rebuilt Aicila Group around four AI agents, including one that monitors regulatory filings and company announcements for hiring signals such as a European animal-health company expanding into Indonesia or Vietnam, while she reviews and approves every shortlist and message before anything is sent. · Sales · intermediate
• Turn a pile of loan or credit application documents into a one-page review memo: have an AI sort the paperwork, work out income, check it against your rules and flag mismatchesLenders, brokers, landlords and finance teams lose hours sorting pay slips, statements and IDs, retyping figures and hunting for numbers that don't add up before anyone can make a decision. An AI agent can sort each document by type, pull out the key figures, calculate income the way your policy says, test it against your rules and list any discrepancies in a short memo a person reviews. TD Bank Group said (May 21 and Oct 13, 2026) its agentic AI classifies client documents, extracts key information, calculates income, validates figures against selected policy requirements and flags discrepancies to produce an underwriter summary, cutting average mortgage pre-adjudication time from 15 hours to under three minutes, with colleagues reviewing every output. · Finance · intermediate
• Catch wrong dates, times and locations other people post about your events or business: a morning check that finds every listing and flags what doesn't matchVenues, partners, local media, tourism sites and chambers of commerce often repost your event or business details, and they don't always get them right. One wrong showtime on a page you didn't know existed can send customers to an empty field. An AI assistant with web search can check each upcoming event every morning, find where it is listed, compare every date, time, location and ticket link against your own details, and give you a short list of mismatches with links so you can ask for corrections. Larissa Guetter, who runs the two-person ATV Big Air Tour across 26 US events a season, wrote (Oct 2026) that her scheduled 8 AM ChatGPT briefing caught a regional tourism site advertising a 7:00 PM show as 8:00 PM; OpenAI reported the check cut her listing reviews from about eight hours a week to one, with her still deciding what is correct and sending the corrections herself. · Marketing · beginner
• Count your stock from photos and get a reorder plan: snap your shelves or bins, let AI build the inventory sheet and suggest what to reorderCounting merchandise by hand and working out what to reorder is the job small sellers dread, so it gets put off until something sells out. You can photograph your stock, have an AI assistant identify and count each item and size, turn it into a spreadsheet, compare it with what sold, and suggest a reorder list you check before sending anything to a supplier. OpenAI reported (Oct 2026) that Larissa Guetter of ATV Big Air Tour, a two-person touring motorsports show, uploads photos of the tour's merchandise to ChatGPT Work, which organizes the inventory, builds a spreadsheet and reorder recommendations in under 15 minutes; with her review and adjustments, inventory-to-reorder now takes two to three hours instead of two to three days. · Ecommerce · beginner
• Turn your own month-end reconciliation workbook into AI close agents: hand over the spreadsheet you already use, let the AI roll it forward each month, and keep a person reviewing and posting every entryInstead of redesigning how they close the books, Charlotte accounting firm Lavoie CPA gave Truewind its existing balance sheet reconciliation workbook plus the monthly input files that feed it (payroll registers, brokerage statements, Stripe and Braintree exports, donor platform reports). Truewind built AI workpaper agents from that workbook; each month a staff member rolls them forward, reviews the output and posts the entries to Sage Intacct herself. Truewind's case study (Oct 21, 2026) says one client's full monthly close, reconciliations included, took about 30 to 45 minutes, and the firm grew from 8 to 15 client entities on the system between April and October 2026 without backfilling two staff roles. The lesson for any small business or bookkeeper: start from the process you already trust, automate one close at a time, and keep a human approving every entry. · Finance · intermediate
• Hand your office busywork to an AI agent safely, even on a locked-down work laptop: inbox sorting, call notes, filing and first drafts, with a rule that it never deletes anythingYou don't need to code or have admin rights to get real office work off your plate. A non-developer posting as Dédale on X (Oct 23, 2026) wrote that an AI agent now does a real chunk of their office work on a locked-down work laptop, mostly before they sit down: sorting the inbox each morning, turning call notes into clean notes, filing attachments in the right folders, and producing first versions of Word, Excel and PowerPoint files. The mistake they made at the start was letting it delete files; now it moves everything to an 'Old' folder and nothing is thrown away, so the worst it can do is put a file in the wrong place. This prompt sets up that morning routine with the same no-delete rule. Check your employer's AI policy before connecting work accounts. · Personal Productivity · beginner
• Write a listing description from your walkthrough notes that stays within fair-housing rules and your MLS character limitTurn rough walkthrough notes and the facts sheet into an MLS-ready listing description, a short version for portals and social, and a list of claims you still need to verify. The prompt keeps the copy about the property, not about who should live there, and flags wording that fair-housing advertising guidance warns against. · Marketing · beginner
• Follow up with every open-house visitor the same evening, with a different message for buyers, neighbours and visitors who already have an agentOpen-house sign-in sheets often sit in a folder for days. This prompt sorts the sign-ins by type and drafts a personal same-day follow-up for each group, using what you noted about each visitor, plus a short summary you can send the seller. · Sales · beginner
• Turn your local sales numbers into a plain-English monthly market update for past clients and your sphereA monthly market email keeps past clients thinking of you, but generic national headlines don't help anyone. Paste your own local MLS or board statistics and the prompt writes a short, honest update: what changed, what it means for buyers and sellers, and one question to reply to. · Marketing · beginner
• Explain your comparable sales to a seller in plain English before the listing appointmentSellers often fixate on one high sale or an online estimate. Paste the comparables you pulled and your adjustments, and the prompt writes a clear one-page explanation of the suggested price range, why each comp matters, and answers to the objections sellers usually raise. The pricing judgement stays yours. · Sales · intermediate
• Build the one-page fact sheet your AI receptionist answers from, and the list of things it must never sayMost bad AI phone answers come from missing or outdated facts, not from the AI itself. This prompt interviews you and turns your answers into a short, structured fact sheet (hours, services, prices, service area, booking rules) plus a 'never say' list, ready to paste into any AI receptionist, chatbot or answering service. · Customer Support · beginner
• Test your AI receptionist with 25 tricky practice calls before real customers hear itAn AI receptionist that sounds fine on an easy test call can still mishandle an emergency, an angry caller or a question it shouldn't answer. This prompt writes 25 realistic test calls for your business, says what a good answer must include for each, and gives you a scoring sheet so you can fix the script before going live. · Customer Support · beginner
• Stop chasing other agents between showings: send every listing agent all your questions at once and get the answers back as one comparison tableA coastal agent lost hours in the car waiting on voice notes and slow replies from other agencies. An AI assistant now writes to each listing agent with every question at once, sends him the key points as answers arrive, builds a table for each property, and stops to hand him anything with a catch, because he runs the deal. Start with the prompt below to write the questions and the table, and keep sending in your own hands until you trust it. · Sales · intermediate

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