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Automate Your Employee List Sync
Automate Your Employee List Sync

Use SFTP or a direct HRIS sync to automatically sync your employee list (aka organization members or org members, or your audience)

Tom O'Dea avatar
Written by Tom O'Dea
Updated over a week ago

Are you a BambooHR customer?

Click here for instructions on setting up a direct integration with BambooHR.

Are you a Rippling customer?

Click here for instructions on setting up a direct integration with Rippling.

Are you an ADP customer?

Read the instructions below and click here for additional guidance.

Are you a Workday customer?

Read the instructions below and use Workday's EIB tool.

Are you a UKG customer?

Read the instructions below and contact us for guidance if needed. When you set this up through UKG, they'll send us a vendor questionnaire to fill out so they can enable this integration.

For everyone else...

To automate your employee list file sync, your IT team will have to (1) automatically generate your employee list from your HRIS, payroll system, or Active Directory using one of the employee list templates as a guide and (2) send that file to us on a cadence you choose (daily, weekly, every 5 minutes... it's up to you).

If you automate your file sync, the name of the file must be "members.csv". See the instructions for creating your file for more info.

We are happy to talk about this with you and your IT group if/when you decide you want to set this up, just contact us at support@blissbook.com.

Set Up

Start on the EMPLOYEE LIST SYNC tab of your Employees page (click Employees in the main navigation on the left side).

Next, click the Enable button next to the "Automatically via SFTP" section.

For SFTP, click the button and then click Install. Blissbook will automatically generate a secure username and password for you and your credentials & settings will be shown once you click the Install button. Use those credentials to connect to Blissbook to send us your file. Your file should include all active employees; it is a full file sync (see the instructions for creating your file). The file is read upon receipt and then immediately deleted for security reasons. You will receive a response from our FTP server to report the success or failure of your sync attempt.

Timing

Again, your employee list in Blissbook updates any time you send a file. Most of our customers send it nightly, but you could send it every 5 minutes or once a week if you want to.

More important is the order in which certain events happen. If you are sending automated invitations to new employees through Blissbook, those employees' email addresses must be valid. Blissbook also needs to know about a new employee before they try to sign in to Blissbook. So the ordering should be:

  1. Email address works (so the invitation/login email won't bounce)

  2. You tell Blissbook

  3. Employee then tries to sign in

If you aren't using Blissbook to send invitations, 1 & 2 could be flip-flopped and it would still be OK.

WinSCP Example SFTP Script

WinSCP, a free SFTP client for Windows, can be used to automate your employee file sync. Below is an example script to sync your file to our SFTP server. The SHA 256 Fingerprint as well as your username and password will be available after you install the SFTP integration. For additional WinSCP scripting and command line options, please refer to WinSCP's guides on automating file transfers and scheduling file transfers.

blissbook-sftp-script.txt

open sftp://<username>:<password>@sftp.blissbook.com:3022/ -hostkey="ssh-rsa 4096 <sha-256-fingerprint>="
put -nopermissions -nopreservetime -resumesupport=off members.csv
close

Note: Since your filename must be members.csv, you need to disable resumes or the strict filename rule kills the transfer.

Command Line

winscp.exe /ini=nul /script=”blissbook-sftp-script.txt”

Even if you cannot generate/download your employee list file report automatically from your HRIS platform, you can use WinSCP's automation features to make your "manual" file upload take a minute or less. Your workflow would be: Log into HRIS, download your report, drag and drop the downloaded csv file onto a desktop shortcut. That's it!

Microsoft Power Automate

Here's an example of a working configuration using Microsoft Power Automate:

Cyberduck

Here's an example of a working configuration using Cyberduck:

Mulesoft

When writing content, use `CREATE_NEW`. Do NOT use `OVERWRITE`.

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