Accounting & HR
Set up Personio (HR)
Connect Personio to make HR's own records searchable — each person becomes a situated record (name, role, team, office, dates), so “who runs marketing” and “when did the head of design join” answer from the system of record. Read-only — nothing is ever written back.
Before you start
- In Personio open Settings → Integrations → API credentials and generate a credential pair with READ access to persons — the only scope it needs.
- Personio shows the secret once, when the pair is generated — copy the Client ID and Client secret right away. If the secret is lost or exposed, generate a new pair and update both fields here.
- Tokens mint themselves from the pair on every sync, so nothing expires on its own; only reads are ever issued.
- Documents → Personio, paste the Client ID and Client secret.
- Optionally open Advanced and set Which people — Active people (default) or Everyone, former employees included.
- Choose access groups carefully (HR data), Test, then Sync.
What comes in
- Each person as one situated record — name, role, team, office, dates and every other field Personio's API exposes for the account (its shape varies by configuration). Nested details flatten into dotted fields such as employment.role; a list of plain values joins into one line.
- Custom attributes only when they carry a human label, which is what is shown; one with no label is skipped outright rather than shown under an opaque key.
- Anything sensitive by name is dropped before it syncs: salary, compensation, wage and pay-rate fields, bank and tax identifiers, passport and national-ID numbers, birth date, gender and marital status, and any password- or token-like field.
- Hire, start, termination and contract-end dates are carried as dates.
- The people themselves are importable as accounts from this source (see “Import your team”).
| Which people | Active covers everyone currently employed, including people on leave or still onboarding. Everyone adds former employees, which keeps questions like “who used to run support” answerable — at the cost of surfacing people who are gone. |
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Access
Access is allow-only: Personio exposes no per-person viewers of its own, so the access groups chosen when the source is set up cover every record it brings in. People data is sensitive — an HR or leadership access group is usually right.
Any field the credential itself cannot read never arrives at all. A record refreshes here only when Personio's own updated stamp for that person moves. People are capped at 5,000; past that the sync summary says so and everyone beyond the cap stays as already ingested rather than reading as gone. Test signs in with the pair and reports how many people are visible; a rejected pair says so, and if Personio answers without an access token Test asks you to check the API credentials and their scope.
Last updated 20 Sep 2026