Global Payroll Employee Sync for Personio

Personio’s intelligent HR platform helps small and medium-sized organizations unlock the power of their people by simplifying complex, time-consuming tasks.

This integration enhances HR team productivity by seamlessly connecting employee data and automating repetitive tasks. By reducing manual data entry, it minimizes the risk of errors in HR processes and communications, ensuring a smoother onboarding experience and preventing unnecessary delays.

The integration is free for customers using both Personio and Remote.

In this article

• Is this integration right for me?
• How to enable Personio integration
  • Create Sync to Remote custom field
  • Create your API credentials
  • Connect Personio with Remote
  • Set up employee sync
• How to customize the legal entity for Global Payroll employees
• How to disable the integration
• Troubleshooting/FAQs

Is this integration right for me?

Before enabling the integration, it is important to understand who it is available for and how data synchronization works to ensure it meets your needs. Listed below and key details to help you decide if this integration is the right fit for you:

Data synced from Personio

The data synced from Personio into Remote depends on your Personio account configuration. There are three types of data fields:

1. Standard fields

These employee data fields for Global Payroll employees are supported using Personio's built-in field structure. They are synced automatically from Personio to Remote.

• For new hires: The following information is synced upon hiring:
  • Email address (used as a unique identifier for each user)
  • Full name
  • First name, Last name
  • Preferred name
  • Start date
  • Job title
  • Salary (if salary is entered in Personio)
  • Country
  • Address (excluding country)
  • Department
  • Supervisor
  • Emergency contact
  • SSN (for US employees)
  • Birth date
  • Nationality
• For active GP employees, we sync and update:
  • Full name
  • Job title
  • Salary (if salary is entered in Personio)
  • Department
  • Supervisor
  • Emergency contact
  • SSN (for US employees)
  • Address (excluding country)
  • Start date
  • Birth date
  • First name, Last name
  • Preferred name
  • Nationality

Some of these fields may not be available because they depend on the features enabled in your Personio account. If available, Remote syncs them using Personio's universal IDs. If any of these are not present in your Personio setup, you need to create custom fields using the exact spelling as shown below:

• Country
• City
• Postal Code
• Nationality
• Birth Date
• SSN

2. Custom fields

These fields are not yet supported by Personio universal IDs. To sync them, you need to create custom fields in Personio using the exact spelling as shown below:

• Personal email
• Address Line 1
• Address Line 2
• State
• Middle name
• Mobile phone
• Preferred pronouns
• Legal sex
• Emergency contact name
• Emergency contact relationship
• Emergency contact email
• Emergency contact phone
• Emergency contact mobile phone

Direction of sync: One-way from Personio to Remote

Frequency of sync: Once per hour

Time off for Global Payroll employees: Approved future time off requests can be synced from Personio into Remote using Employee Time off Sync with Personio integration.

How to enable Personio integration

Prerequisites

Before enabling the integration, you need to have administrative permissions in Personio.

Create Sync to Remote custom field

To set up employee sync, you need to create a Custom field in Personio to specify which employments and contractors should sync through the integration.

Follow these steps to create a custom field in Personio:

1. Log into your Personio account.
2. Navigate to Settings > People > Employee information.
3. Click on the Add an attribute button.
4. Configure the custom field using the following settings:
   1. Field Name: Sync to Remote as (copy/paste exactly to avoid errors)
   2. Type: List of options
   3. Answers: As global payroll employee

Similar to Sync to Remote as, you can create custom fields for data that is not in Personio by default. This names of these fields need to be: Country, Personal email, Address line 1, Address line 2, City, State, Postal code, Middle name, Nationality, Birth date, Mobile phone, Preferred pronouns, Legal sex, SSN, Emergency contact name, Emergency contact relationship, Emergency contact email, Emergency contact phone, Emergency contact mobile phone.

Excluding dates, you can use type General for most of these, or you can opt for List of options if you want a limited set of options. Please make sure to use the exact names for the fields as mentioned above. If you already have fields with this data, you can rename them to match these names instead.

Create your API credentials

1. From Settings > Integrations > API credentials, click on the Create custom integration button.
2. In the next step, make sure to select Read access for Employees, Attendances, Time off and Compensations. Click on Choose attributes > Select all and finally click on Create integration.

This returns a client ID and API secret that you will need for the next step.

Connect Personio with Remote

Follow these steps to connect Personio with Remote and enable the integration:

1. Log in to Remote and go to Company settings > Integrations & APIs.
2. Click Add on the Personio for GP integration card and then on Add to Remote button.
3. Submit your Personio login credentials that you received in the previous step to authenticate the integration. Your credentials will be used to securely sync your Personio account to Remote.
4. Once you’ve received the success message, you can close the pop-up window. You've authenticated us to be able to access your data through the integration.

Your Personio account is now linked to Remote.

Enable employee information sync

Now that your Personio for GP integration is set up, you can configure your accounts to sync employee information from Personio to Remote.

1. In Personio, navigate to the Employees tab and open the Employee List.
2. Select the employee you want to sync with Remote and click on Edit profile.
3. In the Sync to Remote as field, choose As global payroll employee and click Edit profile.
4. Repeat these steps for all employees you want to sync with Remote.

Your Personio account is now linked to Remote. From this moment on, every hour, Remote will perform automatic syncs of the employees you have selected earlier. To do an immediate sync at any time, you also have an option of performing a manual sync. This option comes in handy when you add a new employee to the sync list and want to quickly run a sync to add that employee to Remote’s server.

In Remote, navigate to Company settings > Integrations & APIs > Personio for GP. On the overview page, click on the Sync button in the Manually sync data from Personio to Remote section.

Note: When new employees are added, their full name, email, start date, job title, address, and supervisor data is transferred from Personio to Remote. When existing employees are synced, only their name, job title, address, and supervisor fields are synced from Personio to Remote.

How to customize the legal entity for Global Payroll employees

Our integration can infer the legal entity your Global Payroll employees will be assigned to when they are created in Remote using the country of employment. In this case, the integration will check for any existing entities on that country that are in an active state, or in the process of being set up, and use that one as the entity the employees will belong to.

However, in case you have more than one legal entity in a country or you want to have a finer control on which entity each employee should be assigned to you can customize it.

Please keep in mind that you cannot change the entity for an already existing employee through our integration. If you face this use case, please change the entity manually in Remote.

To customize the entity that your employees will use in Remote you need to create a specific custom attribute, where you’ll add the entity name for each employee. The process is as follows:

1. In Personio, navigate to Settings > People > Employee information. Click on Add an attribute button. Use the following information to configure the custom attribute:
   • Field Name: Entity name from Remote
     • Important: Please use the exact description for this field, or your legal entity customization will not work.
   • Type: Text
   • Click on Add
2. Add the necessary permission for the integration to access the newly created field. For this, go to Settings > API credentials (under Integrations) and click on your integration. On the Readable employee attributes dropdown, ensure that Entity name from Remote is checked.
3. Navigate to the profile of the employee you want to customize the legal entity for, look for the Entity name from Remote field, and fill it with a valid legal entity for your company in Remote.
   • Important: Please make sure to use the exact entity name in Remote. We suggest copying/pasting the name into this field.
4. When you trigger a new manual sync from Remote or wait for the automatic sync your employees will be synced with the correct legal entity.

How to disable the integration

If you want to disable the Personio integration,

1. Log into Remote and navigate to Company settings > Integrations & APIs > Personio for GP.
2. Click on the Remove integration button.
3. From the pop-up, select Delete integration to confirm.

Troubleshooting/FAQs

I followed the setup instructions but none of the employees are syncing to Remote

If none of the employees are syncing to Remote, it suggests an issue with the configuration of permissions. Please verify that all required permissions are included in the API credentials.

Some of the employees are not syncing to Remote

If some of the employees are not syncing, try the following:

1. Check that the employees you want to sync have the right value for the custom field Sync to Remote as → As global payroll employee.
2. Double-check their email addresses. We match records in Personio and Remote based on their work and personal emails.
   1. To sync an existing user in Remote, their email address in Personio must be an exact match. Try updating the email to match and do a manual sync on Remote. You can then change the email address back — but note that email changes in Personio will always sync to Remote.
   2. If the email address of an employee is linked to an archived profile of the same person, contact our support team to have them merge the profiles.

If you’ve confirmed there is no issue with the above but the problem still persists, please reach out to our support team at help@remote.com and send:

• Screenshots of the Permission Group configuration for the Service User, found in Settings > Integrations > API Credentials in Personio.
• Full list of employees that are not syncing. For each user, provide:
  • Name
  • Email in Remote
  • Personal and work email in Personio
  • “Sync to Remote as” field value
  • Start date
  • Employee ID from Personio (found in the URL of the employee’s profile)

I want to make changes to the employee’s profile before onboarding starts

You can update a new employee’s name, start date, job title, or email address in Personio, and these changes will sync to Remote as long as the onboarding has not started in Remote.

• Data changes may take up to an hour to sync from Personio to Remote. To sync immediately, you have to perform a manual sync.