Connecting HR to payroll has never had this much flexibility and control.

One of the cornerstones of Worknice is the ability to streamline all your HR processes and interactions in the one platform. Connecting apps, people and data together is a big part of that. 

You might be thinking, “hey Worknice, your XERO integration was already doing everything it needed to – what enhancements could help me further?” Well, you don’t know ’til you know!

Here’s why we worked hard to add these 3 new enhancements. As our platform and client base has expanded, so too has our realisation that more flexibility is needed in the way we connect to XERO payroll. As a result, we have rethought our integration and added three massive enhancements that will allow clients to sync (or not sync) their payroll data to Worknice. 

We introduce 3 massive enhancements…

XERO integration – connection control

Integrate at the employee level

Now this is a cool feature, people. Infact, so cool we didn’t even know what to call it – we haven’t seen it anywhere else in the HR management platform market. We were going to call it the ‘XERO integrator 4000 extraordinaire’, but in the end went with something a bit more boring, ‘integration connection control’. Ok enough of the hyping…

So what is it? Rather than connecting Worknice to XERO and syncing at the account level, now you can control how the integration works at the individual level. This offers all sorts of control as you start adding more diverse employee roles into your business, such as unpaid workers, contractors, etc. No longer is it a ‘sync everything, or sync nothing’ situation. Cool!

What is a connection within the XERO integration?

Connections are used to link records in Worknice with those in Xero at the employee level. So this is cool. Basically Joe bloggs in Worknice and Joe bloggs in XERO has its own unique connection.

Why is a unique connection for each person important?

It’s pretty simple – because now you can control each persons sync uniquely.  It offers you a new level of flexibility and control. You can treat the Joe Bloggs connection to XERO differently to a Mary Smith connection.

Imagine this. You decide to onboard Joe Bloggs as an unpaid employee into your business – for example he is a volunteer. Yep, we need to get his personal details like address, have him sign and acknowledge documents, and maybe upload a licence –  BUT we do not want to add Joe into XERO payroll (because he won’t be paid). By having Joes connection unique, we can tell Worknice not to create a record in payroll and ignore him in future syncs. Awesome!

What can you do with a unique connection?

There are two key ways that this will be typically used; to ignore connections in the recurring sync between XERO and Worknice, and to also connect employee records between the two systems that don’t have matching data – like email.

XERO integration – integrate multiple accounts

Pull all your people and data together by connecting to multiple XERO payroll accounts

So, if you use multiple XERO accounts you may be wondering; does Worknice allow me to connect multiple XERO payroll accounts into the one Worknice system? Well, the answer to that question is “yeah baby!”. Go berserk – why stop at just 3 like the screenshot above? We have seen as many as 5 connected in the short time this has been available. (P.S if you have many more than 5, maybe consider consolidating a little bit?)

The power of this feature is you can manage all your people in the one Worknice (HRIS) platform. Remember, the goal here is to create an incredible experience with all your people, data and apps connected together and this is an important step toward achieving this.

At a glance of the screenshot above, you can see that you can connect as many XERO accounts as you like. It is shockingly easy to establish each connection and even easier to manage moving forward. On top of that, we have been able to maintain ALL off the integration features that were available in the existing set up;

01. Synchronised connections

Maintain connections to multiple XERO accounts at the same time (do not need to cycle manually between connections). No cheating here, all XERO connections are always online and ready to sync when data changes in Worknice or XERO. 

02. 2-way integration

All XERO connections operate 2-ways, XERO to Worknice, and Worknice to XERO.  This is really important for flexibility. By offering 2-way integration different teams can choose to work in the platform they feel comfortable with. For example, account’s teams (or accountant’s) like to work in XERO when they update payroll information or approve leave. So rather than forcing them to use Worknice, let them stay in XERO. It’ll save a huge amount of headache in the change management process.

03. Sync single employees with multiple payrolls

One person, multiple payrolls. It’s not super common, but the need for this comes up for most growing businesses at least once. Now you can mange the flow of data to multiple payrolls and sure they are up to date with Worknice – your true source of truth.

XERO Integration: automation rules

Now that we have this additional control within the integration (such as ignoring etc), we now offer you the chance to set some default rules. Again, this is ALL about giving you more flexibility and control, which ultimately saves time doing the repetitive HR admin work.

You can see in the image what the rules are all about.  Which rule you choose will be defined by the your particular business conditions. For example,

If you have a pretty simple workforce made up of permanent paid employees, you’ll likely set the rule to “Automatically create new record in XERO/Worknice”. 

If you have a complex workforce made up of unpaid employees, contractors in overseas entities etc you will likely want Worknice to ask you what to do when a new person is added to the system. This gives you the chance to say ‘hey, don’t add this person to payroll in XERO’. Alternatively, you might have an external person set up in XERO that provides a service but you don’t want them in your Worknice platform. 

The point is – however you want the integration to work, you have the control.