BambooHR

Are you still spending hours on manual data entry for your employees? There’s a better way with the 15Five and BambooHR integration.

BambooHR is a human resource software that allows you to onboard your team and manage payroll + benefits. If your organization uses BambooHR, you can enable the BambooHR > 15Five integration to import employee data, manage 15Five seats, sync employee and group data, and set up a management hierarchy in 15Five.

When you use 15Five and BambooHR together, you’ll experience a simple and affordable solution to manage the most valuable aspect of your business — your employees.

What you’ll find in this article:

• Things to consider before enabling BambooHR
• How to set up BambooHR
• What data syncs from BambooHR > 15Five?
• How to run a manual sync from BambooHR > 15Five
• Filtering options
• How to disconnect the integration
• Troubleshooting and FAQs

Things to consider before enabling BambooHR

• If there are certain people or groups of people you don't want to import from BambooHR to 15Five, select the "Limit to manual sync" option when setting up your BambooHR integration and reach out to 15Five's support team at support@15five.com before running a sync to request they set up filters on the backend. You can see available filters in the 'Filtering options' section of this article. In your email to 15Five Support, please include the names of the exclusion or inclusion filters you want to use, as well as the exact names of the departments, locations, divisions, employment statuses, and/or emails you want to exclude/include as they appear in BambooHR.
• Before performing a sync, make sure that the "Email" field in BambooHR contains employee's work emails, rather than personal emails. If an individual's personal email, rather than their work email, is in BambooHR, there is not a way to have the fields revert back to syncing their work email—aka if you are first synced using your personal email, we cannot update to sync your work email.
• If you want to sync employees over, but don't want them to have access to 15Five yet, use the hire date field in BambooHR (start date in 15Five) to indicate when you want to start syncing that person and when you want that person to have access to 15Five. To use this field, the "Sync start dates" option must be checked off in integration settings.

Set up the BambooHR integration

The BambooHR integration allows you to import and update employee information via automatic or manual sync, rather than having to create each individual profile in 15Five one by one. Huge time saver!

Included in the integration is an option to exclude employees from being added to 15Five by excluding specific departments, locations, divisions, or emails — that way, you're in control of who is using 15Five.

1. Click on the Settings gear in the top, right-hand corner of 15Five.
   
2. Select 'Features' from the dropdown menu.
   
3. Click to open the 'Integrations' section.
   
4. Click Enable to the right of BambooHR.
   
5. Find your BambooHR subdomain by opening BambooHR and looking at the URL. If your URL is https://genericcompany.bamboohr.com, that means your subdomain is genericcompany. Then, enter it in 15Five in the 'subdomain' field.
   
6. Click Authenticate. You will see a success message letting you know that the integration is enabled.
   
7. The subdomain you entered will appear, and an API key will automatically populate.
8. The BambooHR Features page allows you to choose whether BambooHR will sync automatically (once a day at 11AM UTC/7AM EST) or if you only want syncs to happen when you manually push them. We recommend that you start with manual syncing, so you can confirm everything looks correct for a couple of syncs, before turning on automatic sync.
   
9. Decide if you want start dates to be pulled in from BambooHR into 15Five. Start dates allow you to delay email invites to 15Five if an employee's hireDate field in BambooHR is in the future. 
   
10. Confirm or update the email invitation text. This invite email will be sent when a new person is added to 15Five via the BambooHR integration. If you'd like for invite emails to be sent out immediately when people are added to 15Five via a BambooHR sync, make sure that the "Immediately send invite emails to imported people" setting is enabled in your Company settings prior to running a sync. If you don't want people you add via BambooHR to receive access to 15Five immediately, choose the "Don’t send invites immediately after import" option and you can manually send invites at a later date.
    
11. Click Save.
    
12. If you chose to run a manual sync in step #8 above, jump down to the 'Run a manual sync' section of this article. If you opted for automatic syncs, a sync will immediately initiate upon saving. Check for any error messages upon import, as you may have to correct email addresses and/or manager information.

What data syncs?

You can choose to sync your BambooHR data manually or have 15Five automatically sync data from BambooHR to 15Five daily at 11AM UTC/ 7AM EST.

Run a manual sync

Ready to sync BambooHR and 15Five? This section walks through how to perform a manual sync from BambooHR to 15Five. We always recommend running a manual sync to initially carry employees and employee data from BambooHR to 15Five, then you can set up automatic daily syncs in your integration settings.

1. Go to the 'BambooHR Settings' page.
2. Click the orange Start sync button. Don't worry—you will get to preview the changes before syncing.
   
3. Once the sync starts, you will see the screen below. It can sometimes take a second to refresh, so you can navigate away (or take a quick coffee break) and come back.
4. After the sync is complete, you'll be taken to a screen to choose what to do with the import. Options are: Cancel import, Re-run import, or Start BambooHR import. If you navigated away from the sync page, you can pull up the preview page by navigating back to the 'BambooHR Settings’ page and clicking View history.
   
   
5. Check the data to ensure everything looks accurate. The integration is set to scan all profiles that are not excluded (see the 'Filtering' section below), so don't panic if you see an individual who already exists in 15Five show up in the sync— it just means we are updating their information to reflect any changes that have been made in BambooHR since the last sync. Check to ensure that anyone who should be excluded based on filters are not in this list.
6. You can also use the blue arrow to open an individual’s BambooHR profile directly from this page by clicking the purple icon to the left of their name and status.
7. If everything looks good, click the orange Start BambooHR import button.
8. You will be taken to the same loading screen as before. It shouldn't take long. Once the sync completes, you will see a note telling you that it was successful.
9.  If you want to view the sync history, click the Back to all History link. On the history page you will see a list of all syncs, successful and unsuccessful.

Exclusion/inclusion filtering options

BambooHR, by default, will import all profiles that the API key can access. However, you can limit the profiles that get synced from BambooHR using filters. Filters are added by our Support Team and cannot be added by account administrators within the application.

If you would like to add or remove a filter, please have an account admin email us at support@15Five.com with the names of the exclusion or inclusion filters you want to use, as well as the exact names of the departments, locations, divisions, employment statuses, and/or emails you want to exclude/include as they appear in BambooHR.

Inclusive filter options:

• departments
• locations
• divisions 
• employment_statuses 

Exclusive filter options:

• excluded_departments
• excluded_locations
• excluded_divisions
• excluded_emails
• excluded_employment_statuses 

Disconnect the BambooHR integration

To disconnect the BambooHR integration, click Disable BambooHR from the 'BambooHR Settings' page. 

Troubleshooting, Support, and FAQs

• Q: Why isn't BambooHR syncing? There are times when BambooHR will not import or sync. Sometimes an account administrator cancels an import and it freezes up an installation.
  A: Reach out to 15Five Support to clear the queue and reinitiate the import.
  
  
• Q: Why aren't BambooHR invites being sent? How can I resend email invites to 15Five? The team was imported but no one received an invite email to log into 15Five. The only way they are able to log in is if they do a password reset.
  A: There are a few reasons why this might have happened: 1) If the 'Email invitation' checkbox is not checked in integration settings, no invites will be sent out to people invited through BambooHR. 2) If the 'Email invitation' checkbox is checked but the message is blank, no invites will go out. 3) If SSO is enabled in your company's 15Five account and the ‘Allow Password Sign In’ option is disabled/ unchecked in the SSO/SAML details, the BambooHR configuration will not include the option for email invitation. 
  If you need to send out email invites, go to the 'Inactive' tab of the 'Manage people' page. You can bulk send email invitations from the "Pending invitations" or "Created people" sections by checking the box to the left of all the people you want to send email invites to, clicking the Actions box, and selecting 'Send invitation' or 'Resend invitation.'
  Help Center article 💡: 'Manage people' page: Active, Inactive, and Deactivated
  
  
• Q: What should I do if my filters stopped working? You had filters set up to not sync certain people into 15Five, but they are now showing as invited.
  A: This issue can happen if the filter name changed in BambooHR. If this is the case, write in to support@15Five.com and we can update the filter for you. Another possibility is that the API key is no longer active or the person who generated it is no longer active in BambooHR. You can regenerate this key in BambooHR by clicking your avatar - API Keys - Add new key.
  
• Q: Why am I receiving an error message that says,  Importing data would exceed the max user count set for this company"? When running a sync or looking at a failed sync in the sync history, you see the error “Error: Importing data would exceed max user count set for this company.”
  A: This happens when the sync will exceed the maximum number of people setting for the company account. You can remove or increase the limit from the 'Company settings' page. 
  
  
• Q: When does 15Five sync with BambooHR when automatic sync is enabled?
  A: The automatic BambooHR syncs kick-off at 11:00 AM UTC/ 7:00 AM EST and will run one sync after another. We can not control when an individual company's sync will actually run. There is an email sent to all account admins after a BambooHR sync. The email will summarize the new accounts created, accounts updated, and accounts deactivated.
• Q: How do we sync our vacations from BambooHR to 15Five?
  A: At this time, you cannot enable vacation syncing in-app. Vacation syncing ca be turned on by 15Five's Support Team via request by emailing support@15five.com. If the setting is on, the vacations will sync during every sync run. Please note that the sole purpose of vacations in 15Five is to skip Check-ins, not as a point of reference for your team to see when upcoming days off are.
  Help Center article 💡: Skip Check-ins with vacations
  
  
• Q: Can I see what information will be synced from BambooHR to 15Five before turning on the full automatic sync?
  A: Yes— we actually suggest doing a manual sync before turning on the automatic sync option. To enable manual syncs, go to the integration settings page and check the box next to 'Limit to manual sync.' You can run a manual sync by following the steps in the 'Run a manual sync' section of this article.
  
  
• Q: Which people in BambooHR are included in the sync?
  A: By default, all full-time employees in BambooHR will be included in the sync unless otherwise specified by filters set up by 15Five Support. If you would like to add or remove a filter, please have an account admin email our Support Team at support@15Five.com with the names of the exclusion or inclusion filters you want to use, as well as the exact names of the departments, locations, divisions, employment statuses, and/or emails you want to exclude/include as they appear in BambooHR.
  
  
• Q: If we were managing 15Five users via CSV import before, then turned on BambooHR, will 15Five recognize the individuals that are already in 15Five and prevent duplicate profiles?
  A: Yes, as long as the email in 15Five is the same as the email in BambooHR.
  
  
• Q: Should we exclude certain populations automatically?
  A: If you have a platform such as Lever or any other hiring software connected to BambooHR, maybe. People that are hired and in BambooHR, but have not yet started at their current job should be excluded from the BambooHR integration via Employment Status. Please reach out to Support and we can work with you on setting up a filter.
  
  
• Q: How can I use CSV import with Bamboo HR enabled?
  A: Please email 15Five Support at support@15five.com and we can enable this ability for you.
  
  
• Q: How does my BambooHR integration handle group types?
  15Five converts departments in BambooHR to Group Type: Groups. You, as an account admin, don't need to do anything. 15Five will add all BambooHR departments as 15Five groups under the group type 'Groups' automatically. While departments in BHR come over to 15Five initially as groups, then they can be moved to another group type manually if needed.
  
  
• Q: I add some employees to BambooHR before they have a work email. How do I stop them from syncing to 15Five until they have their work email set?
  A: If an individual does not have their work email in BambooHR and is initially synced using their personal email, there is not a way to have the fields revert back to syncing their work email— in other words, if you are first synced using your personal email, we cannot update to sync your work email.
  If there are people in BambooHR that you're not ready to pull into 15Five, or that do not have a work email listed yet, use the hire date field in BambooHR (start date in 15Five) to indicate when you want to start syncing that person and when you want that person to have access to 15Five. To use this field, the "Sync start dates" option must be checked off in integration settings. Reach out to support@15Five.com if you accidentally invited an employee with their personal email.