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ADP Automated Employee Sync via SFTP
ADP Automated Employee Sync via SFTP

Tips on automating your employee sync via SFTP for ADP customers

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

ADP has services to help you set up an automated sync of your employee list. Below are answers to common questions about this project.

Creating the Report

To create your report, follow the guidelines in this employee list file help article.

To create the "First Last" name field, you'll have to create a new derived field and concatenate the First name and Last name fields. You can save that derived field as a public or private field for use and then pull it into your report.

  1. Go to the Reports & Analytics tab along the top ribbon and click Fields Library:

  2. Click on + Add calculated fields and select “Derived Field” from the drop down list:

  3. Keep the radio buttons along the top on “Create new field”, select String from the Field Type drop down, then choose Concatenation:

  4. From here, name the derived field (use "Name") and add the fields you want to string together (First and Last) along with the appropriate separator (comma).

  5. Click Done

You will also need to customize the headers of your report to match Blissbook's formatting requirements.

  1. In Step 5 (Select Format) of the advanced reporting set up, there is a “Report Format” section with a preview of the report.

  2. Inside the preview of the report, click on the report column headers (see yellow highlight below) and edit them. For example, your Employee ID field should be "Employee ID" rather than "Associate ID", and your various group fields need to be "Group" or "Groups" rather than "Primary Work Location" or something like that. See our employee list file help article for formatting instructions.

    screenshot of step 5 of the ADP report creation process

  3. Click Save.

Note: ADP can create this report for you as a service. Please contact your ADP rep for help and see below for a timing estimate from ADP.

Automating your Report

ADP can set up the automated delivery of your file/report to Blissbook to keep Blissbook in sync with your file. Please contact your ADP rep for help. They'll send you a questionnaire to fill out. Answer as follows:

  • Protocol: ☒ SFTP ☐ FTP w/ PGP ☐ FTPS

  • Authentication level: ☒ Password ☐ Public Key

  • File Encryption: ☒ None ☐ PGP

  • Host Name / IP Address and Port: sftp.blissbook.com port 3022

  • Username: Follow the instructions in the Set Up section of this help article to get your u/n

  • Password: Follow the instructions in the Set Up section of this help article to get your pw

  • Destination Directory (delivery will be to user root directory if left blank):

  • Date/Timestamp on file name (Y/N): N

  • Filename Format: .csv (See our employee list file help article for formatting instructions)

Notes:

  • You can only see your password once, when you "install" the SFTP automated sync integration. If you're already syncing your employees manually and need to continue to do so, answer "contact me when you're ready to begin setup" for the username & password fields, then create the u/n & pw and send it to ADP when they are ready to turn on your sync. This will limit downtime as you cannot manually sync and automatically sync at the same time, and installing the SFTP sync will turn off your ability to manually sync.

  • ADP says your valid password chars are A-Z, a-z, 0-9, *, &, %, $. It's possible Blissbook will generate a secure password for you that contains characters that ADP does not allow. Check the password before you send it to ADP and uninstall/reinstall the SFTP integration until you get a password that's valid per ADP's requirements.

  • The Destination Directory should be left blank as delivery should go to the root directory as they describe (in parenthesis).

Timing

No matter which project you choose, ADP has a 2-3 week lead time where you're placed in a queue to have the project assigned. After that:

  • If ADP is going to create your file/report for you, they estimate an additional 8-12 weeks.

  • If you can create your file/report yourself and ADP just needs to automate it, it's an additional 1-2 week project.

Cost

To have ADP create your file/report, please check with ADP. We're unsure of that cost.

To have ADP set up the automation after you've created the report, the cost is $400 (subject to change and/or your relationship with ADP).

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