BambooHR: HRIS Integration

If you use BambooHR, Pento offers integration using Bamboo's API, which helps to reduce time spent entering employee details for payroll.

Connecting to BambooHR in Pento

To connect to BambooHR, you will need to follow the steps below:

1. Navigate to Settings from the left sidebar
2. Under the Integrations heading, select Overview
3. You will see an icon for BambooHR; select Integrate
   
   
4. Once you have selected Integrate, the following pop-up will appear:
   
5. Enter your BambooHR company domain, and select Integrate
6. A pop-up should appear directing you to BambooHR's login page

Once you have entered the correct login details, you should be fully connected.

You can find further guidance on connecting to BambooHR on their website

Settings 

Once you have logged in successfully, you should be directed to the Integration settings screen, where you will need to set up your settings and map the fields you require between BambooHR and Pento.

Pause syncing

You can toggle on Pause syncing if you need to update data directly in Pento and do not want it to be overwritten by the data in BambooHR. You can unpause the sync at any point; however, if you do not update the data in BambooHR, the values in Pento will be overwritten with the values from BambooHR. 

Sending payslips via Bamboo

You can toggle on Send additional payslip via Bamboo if you wish for your employee's payslips to be uploaded to BambooHR and via email to the employee email addresses defined in BambooHR and Pento.

Once toggled on, you will see an additional section called Payslip Location. You can choose a specific employee folder from the dropdown menu to save the payslips if you so wish.

Termination and Holiday pay pension settings

You can toggle on Include holiday pay in pension calculations if you wish for termination pay & termination holiday pay to be included in pension calculations by default. Do not toggle this option if it varies from employee to employee.

Excluding employees from being synced

To enable this, please refer to our below article

Sending payroll documents to Bamboo

In addition to sending employees their payroll documents via email, you can also send them to Bamboo. When you select Documents, you can choose which folder the information gets sent to. Toggle on each document type as desired, and they will be sent at the defined intervals.

Sync holiday entitlement from Bamboo

The holiday balance for terminating employees can be synced from your chosen Holiday Policy in Bamboo. Bamboo will calculate the accrued holiday balance, including defining the rounding and can include carryover days.

Once you have enabled the feature, you will be prompted to select the relevant policy type from Bamboo that should be used to calculate the entitled holiday balance for leavers. You also need to confirm if you would like holiday pay to be pensionable by default (this can be updated per employee if required).

💡BambooHR should not need any additional permissions to enable the holiday entitlement sync, but if you have any issues, it's worth checking the integration has been enabled by a full admin of the account.

Mapping Fields

You will also see mapping fields similar to the below screenshot. The fields on the left represent the fields on Pento, whilst the fields on the right represent the fields on BambooHR. You can map any field from BambooHR to Pento, including custom fields. Once mapped, the data will sync from BambooHR to Pento.

How to amend your Settings

You may need to amend your settings in Pento to enable or disable synced fields, amend the payslips and/or termination pay settings, and remove and/or add any employee filters. To do this, you will need to follow the steps below:

1. Navigate to Settings from the left sidebar
2. Under the Integrations heading, select BambooHR
   
   

How the sync works in Pento

Understanding how the data is synced from BambooHR to Pento is useful to ensure your Employee's details are accurate and up to date.

Syncing is executed when Pento is first connected to BambooHR (described above); each time the integrations setting is updated in Pento every hour.

Pento will check for any changes to the mapped fields on employees.

How Employee data is synced

Employee data is synced using the Employee ID, i.e. If there is an employee with the same ID on Pento and BambooHR, the employee data in Pento will be populated with the employee data from BambooHR for the fields defined in the Mapping settings. Any fields defined as Do not map will not be synced.

BambooHR has the ID as Employee #; this will be matched with Employee ID in Pento.

New Starters

Any new employees should be added to BambooHR using a unique and previously unused Employee ID. Once you have added them to BambooHR, as long as the Employee ID is not present on any active or terminated record in Pento, a new employee record will be created for them.

You can refer to our help article How to Add a New Starter to Pento for further guidance.

Syncing individual employees

If you are connected to BambooHR, but an employee's data is not syncing, you can pull through the updates by syncing an individual employee. To do this, you will need to follow the steps below:

1. Navigate to Employees from the left sidebar 
2. Search for the relevant employee
3. To the right of the employee details, select "Actions"
4. Select Sync now

You will also see a timestamp with the last time and date an employee was synced. Once you have triggered Sync now, you will see a successful banner and an updated timestamp.

You can also sync individual employees if you have paused syncing in your BambooHR settings in Pento. 

Sync Indicator ⚡️

The sync indicator highlights which fields are linked to other systems, like your HRIS or HMRC. Basically, it's a heads-up that if you change something in Pento, it'll get updated with the latest info from those other systems the next time Pento syncs up with them.

If a field doesn't have an integration option or it's set to Do Not Map, there won't be a sync indicator next to it.

You can see the indicator in your employees' profile:

In the salary tab:

And on the payslip:

Frequently Asked Questions

I updated my employee's data in BambooHR. Why hasn't it synced with Pento?

Syncing is executed every hour; if you have made changes after a sync has been completed, you may need to wait for it to update. If you are unable to wait, you can try and force the sync through by syncing individual employees.

There may be a few reasons why the employees aren't syncing as you may expect: 

Default fields in Bamboo are not passed through in API

In BambooHR, you can set default fields so that specific fields are selected by default when an employee is created. According to BambooHR, when a field is set by default, it is not passed through in the API, so the information will not be passed through Pento.

To resolve this, edit the employee, reselect the information and resave. The data should then push through into Pento.

Data is not populated in the API until the effective date is reached.

In BambooHR, when you set Job Information, you pick an effective date. The information in the table will not be included in the Bamboo API until the effective date is reached. Consequently, the data will only populate in Pento once the effective date is reached, and if any filters are based on data in this table, then they won’t be filtered out until the effective date is set.

Some possible workarounds for this could be:

• Don’t populate an employee ID until the employees start date so that the employee does not sync through until they have started and the effective date is reached
• Add a custom 'ready for payroll' field and filter out employees set to No

Alternatively, it could be that the information on BambooHR was entered in an invalid format for Pento; see further guidance on accepted formatting here. If this still doesn't pull the changes through, you will need to contact support, who will be able to help.

Employees are showing as Pending in the Employees list.

Employees will only show as Ready once all the required information has been synced. Please refer to our help article on How to ready your employees for payroll and ensure the data is entered on BambooHR.

I need to finalise my payroll, but some employee data is yet to sync. What should I do?

If you are unable to wait for a sync to execute and syncing individual employees has not worked, you can update Pento directly; however, once the sync has been completed, the information on Pento will be overwritten with the data from BambooHR; if it is invalid, it will update the fields in Pento to be blank.

Alternatively, you can pause syncing in your integration settings, update Pento directly and unpause the sync once the payroll has been submitted. You will need to make sure any changes you made to Pento are updated in your HRIS if you require them to be synced. 

I updated Pento but not BambooHR.

As BambooHR is the source of truth for Pento, please make sure that any changes you make on Pento are the same in BambooHR.

Why can’t I use the payslip uploading feature?

For this feature to be usable, the BambooHR API needs permissions for Documents. It’s not possible to switch these on or off in BambooHR, as they are tied to the same level of permissions as the account that created the API key.

To enable this feature, you’ll either need to create a new admin account that has the permissions for Documents turned on from the get-go or, if you’re not an administrator, request that your BambooHR administrator organise this for you.

If you need any more help in enabling this, the customer support team at BambooHR should be able to help.

I'm a full admin, but I'm still being told I don't have permission.

In some cases, BambooHR does not update the permissions of the underlying API key used for authenticating Pento. In this case, you need to follow the below steps:

1. Log into BambooHR
2. Go to Settings
3. Go to API Keys
4. Hover over the Pento row and press the delete icon to delete it
   

5. Once deleted, return to Pento.

6. Go into Settings

7. Go into Integrations.  If your Bamboo integration is still active, click Disconnect.
   

8. Once the integration is disconnected, connect again

9. The system will automatically generate a new API key. The integration settings will be kept, and the issue resolved

Once I have confirmed Payroll, does the information still sync from my HRIS?

No further changes can be made if a payroll is awaiting approval or confirmation. This means any changes affecting the payslip calculations are not synced, e.g. salaries. Once the payroll has been processed and paid, the sync will be ren-enabled and salaries backdated as appropriate. Data that does not affect the payslip values, e.g. bank details, will continue to be synced regardless of the payroll status.