ClickTime Integration with BambooHR

The ClickTime + BambooHR integration allows you to easily sync your organization’s employee and Time Off information between both platforms.

There are two main features of ClickTime’s integration with BambooHR, which we will cover in full:

• Employee Provisioning & Synchronization: Employees created in BambooHR are automatically created in ClickTime and kept up to date when changes are made in BambooHR.
• Time Off Import: Time off requests filed and approved in BambooHR will be automatically added to employee timesheets in ClickTime. Once in ClickTime, they will be able to be reported on and included in calculating employee availability for project allocations.

Click here to watch our Product Team's Video Overview or continue reading if you'd like to learn more.

This guide will cover everything you need to do to set up the integration, as well as best practices to make sure it works as expected. You can choose to take advantage of all or some of these capabilities when connecting your BambooHR account to ClickTime. Contact our team to learn more. 

How to Get Started
Employee Provisioning and Synchronization

• Adding a New Employee
• Updating an Employee
• Terminating/Deleting an Employee

Time Off import

• Adding Time Off to a Locked or Approved Timesheet
• Updating a Time Off Entry in BambooHR
• Editing/Removing Some Days from an Approved Time Off Request
• Deleting All Hours from an Approved Time Off Request

Custom Field: Selective Sync for Employees & Time Off
Known Limitations
ClickTime BambooHR Integration Video

How to Get Started

ClickTime’s Integration Team will guide you through the steps to connect BambooHR to ClickTime. To get started, follow these steps:

1. Email us at integrations@clicktime.com, or fill out this form (select “BambooHR” as the desired integration)
2. Meet with our Integration Team to:
   1. Review the integration workflows
   2. Designate a specific email address to forward notifications
   3. Create an administrative integration user in your BambooHR account
   4. Address any unlinked users (people found in BambooHR but not CT)
3. Next, our Integration Team will take care of the rest for you. Sit back while we:
   1. Configure your ClickTime account for the BambooHR integration
   2. Validate everything is working with you
4. All set! Together we'll set a date to turn the integration on

Employee Provisioning & Synchronization

Adding a New Employee
Updating an Employee
Terminating/Deleting an Employee

Adding a New Employee

When an employee is created in BambooHR a corresponding user is created in your organization’s ClickTime account. If present, the following fields are mapped from BambooHR to ClickTime, respectively:

• First & Last name → Full Name
• Work Email → Email Address
• Employment Status → Employment Type
• Employee # → Employee Number

Once the integration is activated, all employees created in BambooHR will by default have a ClickTime account created. To selectively sync employees to ClickTime, please go to the Custom Field: Selective Sync for Employees & Time Off section of this document

Updating an Employee

Once an employee has been synced across both platforms, certain changes made to their employee profile in BambooHR will be reflected in ClickTime:

• Changes to an employee Name and Employee # in BambooHR are automatically updated in ClickTime by the integration
• Changes to BambooHR Employment Type or Email fields in BambooHR are NOT automatically reflected in ClickTime
  • When these fields are updated in BambooHR, you will receive an email reminding you to update them in ClickTime

Terminating / Deleting an Employee

When an employee is terminated in BambooHR, the status of the corresponding user in ClickTime is set to inactive. As a reminder, an inactive employee cannot enter time or expenses in ClickTime. This article has more information about active/inactive status as well as other settings that can be applied to employees in ClickTime.

If a termination date is specified in BambooHR, the inactivation of a user in ClickTime will occur on that date. If the employee is to be terminated that same day, the employee will be marked as inactive in ClickTime within 10 minutes of being terminated in BambooHR.

Please note if you are using our optional "Audit Trail" feature, the action of inactivating/reactivating an employee will be associated with the "clicktimeintegrationuser+XXXXXX@clicktime.com" account that is required for the integration to work.

Reactivating an Employee

If you have an inactive employee in BambooHR, and that employee is synchronized with ClickTime, marking that employee as "active" in BambooHR will have the same effect in ClickTime. Inactive ClickTime users will be switched to "active" if their status is changed in BambooHR. 

Active users in ClickTime will be able to log into ClickTime, and will also count against your monthly average user count.

Please note if you are using our optional "Audit Trail" feature, the action of inactivating/reactivating an employee will be associated with the "clicktimeintegrationuser+XXXXXX@clicktime.com" account that is required for the integration to work.

Time Off Import

Adding Time Off to a Locked or Approved Timesheet
Updating a Time Off Entry in BambooHR

If your organization uses BambooHR to manage Time Off, approved Time Off Requests can be sent from BambooHR to ClickTime and reflected on employee timesheets.

With ClickTime’s integration with BambooHR, employees who track Time Off in BambooHR can have their approved Time Off Requests synchronized to their timesheets in ClickTime.

When a Time Off Request is approved in BambooHR, the request is sent to ClickTime to be added to the corresponding user’s open timesheet.

Each entry imported to ClickTime will contain the following information pulled from the BambooHR Time Off Request:

• Employee who requested the Time Off
• Time Off type
• Date range
• Hours per day
• Note (entered by the employee who requested Time Off)

Please note that any Time Off imported from BambooHR will not be editable within ClickTime. To make changes to a Time Off entry originally filed in Bamboo, the user will need to do so in the BambooHR application. Any updates made to a previously imported Time Off entry will be reflected in ClickTime.

Important Note: Time Off imports require the email address of the user to be uniform across both platforms. In order for the Time Off Request to be applied to the users timesheet in ClickTime, the email address must be the same for that user in both BambooHR and ClickTime.

Adding Time Off to a Locked or Approved Timesheet

Time Off entries from BambooHR can only be added to open (or rejected) timesheets in ClickTime. As such, imported Time Off cannot be added to locked, approved, or waiting for approval timesheets.

To resolve a blocked Time Off import on a locked timesheet, simply go and either unlock or reject the timesheet in question in ClickTime. More information on unlocking a timesheet can be found here. After that the request will automatically be imported.

If your team is using the Timesheet Approvals feature, and the timesheet is "Approved", you can use the "Undo Approval" option to allow the hours to be added. More information on Undoing Approval can be found here.

Once the entry is applied to the timesheet, you are free to re-lock or re-approve the timesheet.

If the timesheet that will contain the Time Off entry is already approved, you can successfully complete the Time Off import by un-approving the timesheet in ClickTime, allowing the Time Off entry to flow through. Once the entry is applied to the timesheet, you are free to re-approve the timesheet. For more information on timesheet approvals, click here.

Please wait up to 2-3 hours for the entry to flow through after unlocking / unapproving the timesheet.

NOTE: If any part of the Time Off Request belongs to a locked / approved timesheet, the entire import will be halted. In order to successfully import the Time Off Request, you will need to unlock / unapprove the locked timesheet that contains part of the Time Off entry.

Updating a Time Off Entry in BambooHR

If an approved Time Off entry that has been successfully imported to ClickTime is updated in BambooHR, the resulting changes will be pushed to ClickTime under the following conditions:

• If the Time Off entry belongs to an open timesheet, any updates made to the entry in BambooHR will be reflected in ClickTime
• If the Time Off entry belongs to a locked or approved timesheet, an email will be sent to the designated admin notifying them of updates made to the entry
  • In order for these updates to be pushed through to ClickTime, the timesheet in question will need to be unlocked / unapproved
  • Please see the above section Adding Time Off to an Locked or Approved Timesheet for more information on how to resume the import of Time Off for locked / approved timesheets

Please note that by default our integration will allow Time Off functionalities from both ClickTime and BambooHR to run in parallel. To eliminate the option for employees to log Time Off in ClickTime, please set the status of any existing ClickTime Leave Types to "inactivate" (more details on editing Leave Types can be found here).

Other ways to ensure that time off syncs successfully from Bamboo to ClickTime:

• Reject ALL timesheets that correspond to the entire date span of the time off request. EXAMPLE: if the time off request in Bamboo is for Jan 1-20 and this stretches across (2) timesheet periods in ClickTime, then BOTH timesheets will need to be rejected in ClickTime (or the timesheets need to be in 'open' status)
• Remove any Start or End Dates for the employee from their Person Details page: having these dates in place for an employee will prevent hours from being logged to a timesheet and this can also prevent time off hours from being synced from Bamboo for the same reason. see HERE for more details
• Allow at least 3-4 hours for any changes to update from Bamboo to ClickTime
• The ClickTime/Bamboo integration will only sync Time Off requests (or changes to those requests) back to 90 days in the past. If you need to sync a request older than that, we recommend logging that Time Off request separately in ClickTime (meaning not through the integration). You can use one of your existing (non-Bamboo linked) Leave Types in ClickTime for this purpose or create a new one with a different name (see here for more details). Leave Types that are designated for the integration will be labelled as "(BambooHR)" in ClickTime
• Requests can only be synced if the hours from the request have a positive integer value (ie. between 0 and 24). For example: a request containing "-1 hours" will not be synced

Specifically, if there is an error in the BambooHR request, and the timesheet is approved/locked, you can take the following steps to address that:

1. Log into ClickTime
2. Find the corresponding timesheet(s) for the Time Off request (the request may span multiple timesheets) from the Company --> Timesheets page
3. Reject the timesheet(s) in ClickTime
4. Log into BambooHR as an Administrator
5. Go to the "Time Off" tab
6. From the "History" section below, select the Time Off type and year
7. Select "Requests" from the menu on the right
8. Click into the request and make changes (such as the Time Off type)
9. Allow 2-3 hours for BambooHR to send the new changes to ClickTime
10. You should be able to confirm the changes have been made in ClickTime by now
11. You can then re-approve the timesheet(s) in ClickTime if everything is accurate

Editing/Removing Some Days from an Approved Time Off Request (in BambooHR)

If the user has submitted a request for Time Off, and later decide they wish to remove some of those days, they can edit the approved request in BambooHR. If the hours are changed to "0" for the request, those Time Off entries will not appear in ClickTime.

Similarly, they can also change the number of hours they have requested (for example, from "8" to "4"), and those changes should be reflected in ClickTime (providing the timesheet for the time period is open/editable).

Deleting All Hours from an Approved Time Off Request (in BambooHR)

If the user ends up not taking any of the Time Off that has been approved in BambooHR, the employee should instead delete the request from BambooHR. There may be some text in BambooHR indicating "all history will be lost", but the history of the request will still be available afterwards.

Custom Field: Selective Sync for Employees & Time Off

To have control over which employees in BambooHR are synced to ClickTime, you can add a custom field to employee profiles in BambooHR titled “Do not sync to ClickTime.”

The “Do not sync to ClickTime” custom field in BambooHR provides the following functionality, depending on your organization’s integration configuration:

1. For organizations only using the Employee Provisioning feature:
   1. Checking the “Do not sync to ClickTime” box when creating an employee in BambooHR will prevent that user from being created in ClickTime
   2. For already synched employees, checking the “Do not sync to ClickTime” box will prevent any updates to their BambooHR employee profile from being pushed to ClickTime
2. For organizations only using the Time Off import feature:
   1. Checking the “Do not sync to ClickTime” box on an employee's profile will prevent Time Off from being imported from BambooHR to ClickTime (Note: any time off imported to ClickTime prior to checking this box will remain on their timesheet in ClickTime)
3. For organizations using both Employee Provisioning and the Time Off import:
   1. Checking the “Do not sync to ClickTime” box on an employee’s profile will prevent the flow of both Time Off and employee profile updates from being pushed to ClickTime

To create the “Do not sync to ClickTime” field, follow these steps:

• Follow this link to submit a request to BambooHR support
• Select “Custom Fields” as the category
• Enter “Custom field when creating new employee” into the subject field
• For the Description field, copy the following text and paste it in:
  • “Hello, please make a custom field with the following attributes:
    • In the “Personal” section
    • Checkbox
    • Title: ‘Do not sync to ClickTime’”

Once the BambooHR support team has completed your request, the custom field will be present on all employee profiles in the Personal tab.

The next step is to add this field to the “New Employee” form. To do so, follow these steps:

1. Click the “New Employee” button in the People tab of your BambooHR account
2. In the top right hand corner, click the “Customize Add Employee Form” text
3. Find the newly created “Do not sync to ClickTime” field in the Browse Fields section
4. Click the arrow icon on the custom field to have it appear when creating new employees, then press save.

Now the “Do not sync to ClickTime” field will be present on all existing employees in BambooHR, as well as when creating new employees.

Known Limitations

The hours for Time Off Requests in BambooHR must match your ClickTime time entry increment

ClickTime will round hours to the closest 1/10th, 1/4, or 1/2 of an hour. This is a universal setting that is made on the Company --> Preferences page (more info here). If the hours in your BambooHR request do not match your time entry increment, the hours will not synchronize.

Example: Your ClickTime accounts rounds to the closest 1/10th of an hour, but you have submitted a BambooHR request for 3.25 hours. In order for this entry to synchronize, the request should instead be for 3.2 or 3.3 hours so it matches your ClickTime settings.

Company Holidays in BambooHR cannot be imported to ClickTime

• Company Holidays will need to be applied to employee timesheets through ClickTime’s existing Company Holiday functionality
  • For more information on how to apply holidays to employee timesheets, please see this guide

The BambooHR “ClickTime Integration” user must have access to all Time Off types you wish to import into ClickTime.

If you are noticing Approved Time Off not flowing through to ClickTime, please ensure that the integration user has access to the all Time Off Types you want to export to ClickTime. To do this, follow these steps:

1. As an administrator in BambooHR, go to the “Settings” menu (gear icon in the top right hand corner)
2. Click into “Access Levels,” on the left hand side of the screen
3. Find the “Custom Levels” section
4. Find the Custom Access Level that contains the user “ClickTime Integration”
5. Click on the “Access Level Settings” button
6. Scroll down and click into the Time Off Tab
7. Ensure that all Time Off Types you wish to import to ClickTime are marked as having “View Only” access

ClickTime is investigating issues with time off entries that are "superseded" in BambooHR. We have heard reports that entries in this status may not synchronize - in those situations, you may need to reject the request and have it re-submitted. When the second request is approved, the hours should synchronize with ClickTime.

Once a Time Off type that was previously marked as “No Access” is switched to “View Only,” any approved time off for this type will be imported into ClickTime

Currently, BambooHR Leave Types will display as "Company Holiday" in the Mobile Application. Please be assured that the hours are associated with the correct Leave Type (which can be confirmed from the web). We hope to be displaying the correct Leave Type name in the Mobile Application in the near future.

If you are interested in upgrading to a Team Plan account to gain access to Time Off Management features, don’t hesitate to reach out to our support team at support@clicktime.com.

Feedback and Support

We welcome any feedback you might have about the ClickTime integration with BambooHR. If you have any thoughts on what does or does not work for you, as well as improvements we can make, please reach out to us at support@clicktime.com.

ClickTime BambooHR Integration Video