Accounting & HR
Set up BambooHR
Connect BambooHR to make HR's own records searchable — the employee directory becomes situated records (name, role, department, location, who they report to) and the who's-out calendar one rolling note, so “is anyone in that team out this week” and “who does the new engineer report to” answer from the system of record. Read-only.
Before you start
- The credential is an API key: in BambooHR click your photo (bottom left) → API Keys → Add New Key, name it and copy it right away.
- The key reads as its owner — what that account can see is what syncs, so an admin's key sees the whole directory and a narrower account's key sees less. Only reads are ever issued.
- You also need the Company domain: the your-company in your-company.bamboohr.com, exactly what the browser shows while signed in — just the word, not the full address.
- Documents → BambooHR, enter the Company domain (the your-company in your-company.bamboohr.com) and paste the API key.
- Choose access groups, Test, then Sync.
What comes in
- Each employee as one situated record — display name, job title, department, division, location, work email, work phone, supervisor and pronouns, wherever BambooHR has them set; an empty field is simply left off. Pronouns are carried on purpose: they are what the person chose to show on their own directory card.
- One rolling “Who's out” note covering the next 90 days from each sync — every absence with its dates, sorted by start, and company holidays marked as such. Leave shows only as “away” with its span; the kind of leave is never named.
- The directory is importable as accounts from this source (see “Import your team”).
- Only the directory and the who's-out calendar are read — nothing from employee files, pay or time-off balances.
Access
Access is allow-only: BambooHR exposes no per-employee viewers of its own, so the access groups chosen when the source is set up cover everything it brings in — every record and the who's-out note are visible to everyone in those groups. People records are personal data: choose narrowly.
The key reads as its owner — what that account can see is what syncs. If the account has the employee directory disabled (Settings → Employee Directory), or the key's owner cannot see it, BambooHR refuses the read and the source says exactly that. A key without time-off access still syncs people records, just not the who's-out note — the sync summary says the calendar could not be read, nothing fails silently. Test probes the account's field catalogue rather than pulling every employee, so it confirms the key fast; a wrong or deleted key makes it say BambooHR rejected the credentials. The directory caps at 5,000 people; past that the sync summary says so and everyone beyond the cap stays as already ingested rather than reading as removed.
Last updated 20 Sep 2026