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With the rise of data-driven recruitment, it is imperative for each recruitment tool, including candidate sourcing and screening tools, to integrate with Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) for enabling centralized data management for end users. 

However, there are hundreds of ATS applications available in the market today. To integrate with each one of these applications with different ATS APIs is next to impossible. 

That is why more and more recruitment tools are looking for a better (and faster) way to scale their ATS integrations. Unified ATS APIs are one such cost-effective solution that can cut down your integration building and maintenance time by 80%. 

Before moving on to how companies can leverage unified ATS API to streamline candidate sourcing and screening, let’s look at the workflow and how ATS API helps. 

Candidate sourcing and screening workflow

Here’s a quick snapshot of the candidate sourcing and screening workflow: 

1) Job posting/ data entry from job boards

Posting job requirements/ details about open positions to create widespread outreach about the roles you are hiring for. 

2) Candidate sourcing from different platforms/ referrals

Collecting and fetching candidate profiles/ resumes from different platforms—job sites, social media, referrals—to create a pool of potential candidates for the open positions.

3) Resume parsing 

Taking out all relevant data—skills, relevant experience, expected salary, etc. —from a candidate’s resume and updating it based on the company’s requirement in a specific format.

4) Profile screening

Eliminating profiles which are not relevant for the role by mapping profiles to the job requirements.  

5) Background checks 

Conducting a preliminary check to ensure there are no immediate red flags. 

6) Assessment, testing, interviews

Setting up and administering assessments, setting up interviews to ensure role suitability and collating evaluation for final decision making. 

7) Selection 

Sharing feedback and evaluation, communicating decisions to the candidates and continuing the process in case the position doesn’t close. 

How ATS API helps streamline candidate sourcing and screening

Here are some of the top use cases of how ATS API can help streamline candidate sourcing and screening.

Centralized data management and communication

All candidate details from all job boards and portals can be automatically collected and stored at one centralized place for communication and processing and future leverage. 

Automated profile import

ATS APIs ensure real time, automated candidate profile import, reducing manual data entry errors and risk of duplication. 

Customize screening workflows 

ATS APIs can help automate screening workflows by automating resume parsing and screening as well as ensuring that once a step like background checks is complete, assessments and then interview set up are triggered automatically. 

Automated candidate updates within the ATS in real time

ATS APIs facilitate real time data sync and event-based triggers between different applications to ensure that all candidate information available with the company is always up to date and all application updates are captured ASAP.  

Candidate engagement data, insights and patterns using ATS data

ATS APIs help analyze and draw insights from ATS engagement data — like application rate, response to job postings, interview scheduling — to finetune future screening.

Integrations with assessment, interview scheduling and onboarding applications

ATS API can further integrate with other assessment, interview scheduling and onboarding applications enabling faster movement of candidates across different  recruitment stages. 

Personalized outreach based on historical ATS data

ATS API integrations can help companies with automated, personalized and targeted outreach and candidate communication to improve candidate engagement, improve hiring efficiency and facilitate better employer branding. 

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Undoubtedly, using ATS API integration can effectively streamline the candidate sourcing and screening process by automating several parts of the way. However, there are several roadblocks to integrating ATS APIs at scale because of which companies refrain from leveraging the benefits that come along. Try our ROI calculator to see how much building integrations in-house can he.

In the next section we will discuss how to solve the common challenges for SaaS products trying to scale and accelerate their ATS integration strategy.

Addressing challenges of ATS API integration with Unified API

Let's discuss how the roadblocks can be removed with unified ATS API: just one API for all ATS integrations. Learn more about unified APIs here

Challenge 1: Loss of data during data transformation 

When data is being exchanged between different ATS applications and your system, it needs to be normalized and transformed. Since the same details from different applications can have different fields and nuances, chances are if not normalized well, you will end up losing critical data which may not be mapped to specific fields between systems. 

This will hamper centralized data storage, initiate duplication and require manual mapping not to mention screening workflow disruption. At the same time, normalizing each data field from each different API requires developers to understand the nuances of each API. This is a time and resource intensive process and can take months of developer time.

How unified ATS API solves this: One data model to prevent data loss

Unified APIs like Knit help companies normalize different ATS data by mapping different data schemas from different applications into a single, unified data model for all ATS APIs. Data normalization takes place in real time and is almost 10X faster, enabling companies to save tech bandwidth and skip the complex processes that might lead to data loss due to poor mapping.

Bonus: Knit also offers an custom data fields for data that is not included in the unified model, but you may need for your specific use case. It also allows you to to request data directly from the source app via its Passthrough Request feature. Learn more

Challenge 2: Delayed recruitment due to inability of real-time sync and bulk transfers

Second, some ATS API integration has a polling infrastructure which requires recruiters to manually request candidate data from time to time. This lack of automated data updation in real time can lead to delayed sourcing and screening of applicants, delaying the entire recruitment process. This can negatively impact the efficiency that is expected from ATS integration. 

Furthermore, Most ATS platforms receive 1000s of applications in a matter of a few minutes. The data load for transfer can be exceptionally high at times, especially when a new role is posted or there is any update.

As your number of integrated platforms increases, managing such bulk data transfers efficiently as well as eliminating delays becomes a huge challenge for engineering teams with limited bandwidth

How unified ATS API solves this: Sync data in real-time irrespective of data load/ volume

Knit as a unified ATS API ensures that you don’t lose out on even one candidate application or be delayed in receiving them. To achieve this, Knit works on a  webhooks based system with event-based triggers. As soon as an event happens, data syncs automatically via webhooks. 

Read: How webhooks work and how to register one?

Knit manages all the heavy lifting of polling data from ATS apps, dealing with different API calls, rate limits, formats etc. It automatically retrieves new applications from all connected ATS platforms, eliminating the need to make API calls or manual data syncs for candidate sourcing and screening. 

At the same time, Knit comes with retry and resiliency guarantees to ensure that no application is missed irrespective of the data load. Thus, handling data at scale. 

This ensures that recruiters get access to all candidate data in real time to fill positions faster with automated alerts as and when new applications are retrieved for screening. 

Challenge 3: Compliance and candidate privacy concerns

Since the ATS and other connected platforms have access to sensitive data, protecting candidate data from attacks, ensuring constant monitoring and right permission/ access is crucial yet challenging to put in practice.

How unified ATS API solves this: Secure candidate data effectively

Knit unified ATS API enables companies to effectively secure the sensitive candidate data they have access to in multiple ways. 

• First, all data is doubly encrypted, both at rest and in transit. At the same time, all PII and user credentials are encrypted with an additional layer of application security. 

• Second, having an events-driven webhooks architecture, Knit is the only unified ATS API which does not store any copy of the customer data in its server. Thus, reducing changes of data misuse further. 

• Third, Knit is GDPR, SOC II and ISO27001 compliant to make sure all industry security standards are met. So, there’s one less thing for you to worry about.

Challenge 4: Long deployment duration and resource intensive maintenance

Finally, ATS API integration can be a long drawn process. It can take 2 weeks to 3 months and thousands of dollars to build integration with  just a single ATS provider. 

With different end points, data models, nuances, documentation etc. ATS API integration can be a long deployment project, diverting away engineering resources from core functions.

It’s not uncommon for companies to lose valuable deals due to this delay in setting up customer requested ATS integrations. 

Furthermore, the maintenance, documentation, monitoring as well as error handling further drains engineering bandwidth and resources. This can be a major deterrent for smaller companies that need to scale their integration stack to remain competitive.  

How unified ATS API solves this: Instant scalability

A unified ATS API like Knit allows you to connect with 30+ ATS platforms in one go helping you expand your integration stack overnight. 

All you have to do is embed Knit’s UI component into your frontend once. All heavy lifting of auth, endpoints, credential management, verification, token generations, etc. is then taken care of by Knit. 

Other benefits of using a Unified ATS API

Fortunately, companies can easily address the challenges mentioned above and streamline their candidate sourcing and screening process with a unified ATS API. Here are some of the top benefits you get with a unified ATS API:

Effective monitoring and logging for all APIs

Once you have scaled your integrations, it can be difficult to monitor the health of each integration and stay on top of user data and security threats. Unified API like Knit provides a detailed Logs and Issues dashboard i.e. a one page overview of all your integrations, webhooks and API calls. With smart filtering options for Logs and Issues,  Knit helps you get a quick glimpse of the API's status, extract historical data and take necessary action as needed.

Extensive range of Read and Write APIs

Along with Read APIs, Knit also provides a range of Write APIs for ATS integrations so that you can not only fetch data from the apps, you can also update the changes — updating candidate’s stage, rejecting an application etc. — directly into the ATS application's system. See docs

Save countless developer hours and cost

For an average SaaS company, each new integration takes about 6 weeks to 3 months to build and deploy. For maintenance, it takes minimum of 10 developer hours per week. Thus, building each new integration in-house can cost a SaaS business ~USD 15,000. Imagine doing that for 30+ integrations or 200!

On the other hand, by building and maintaining integrations for you, Knit can bring down your annual cost of integrations by as much as 20X. Calculate ROI yourself

In short, an API aggregator is non negotiable if you want to scale your ATS integration stack without compromising valuable in-house engineering bandwidth.

How to improve your screening workflow with Knit unified ATS API

Get Job details from different job boards

Fetch job IDs from your users Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) using Knit’s job data models along with other necessary job information such as departments, offices, hiring managers etc.

Get applicant details

Use the job ID to fetch all and individual applicant details associated with the job posting. This would give you information about the candidate such as contact details, experience, links, location, experience, current stage etc. These data fields will help you screen the candidates in one easy step.

Complete screening activities

Next is where you take care of screening activities on your end after getting required candidate and job details. Based on your use case, you parse CVs, conduct background checks and/or administer assessment procedures.

Push back results into the ATS

Once you have your results, you can progmmatically push data back directly within the ATS system of your users using Knit’s write APIs to ensure a centralized, seamless user experience. For example, based on screening results, you can —

• Update candidate stage using <update stage> API See docs
• Match scores for CV parsing or add a quick tag to your applicant See docs
• Reject an application See docs and much more

Thus, Knit ensures that your entire screening process is smooth and requires minimum intervention.

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Get started with Unified ATS API

If you are looking to quickly connect with 30+ ATS applications — including Greenhouse, Lever, Jobvite and more — get your Knit API keys today.

You may talk to our one of our experts to help you build a customized solution for your ATS API use case. 

The best part? You can also make a specific ATS integration request. We would be happy to prioritize your request. 

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Today, recruitment without ATS applications seems almost impossible. From candidate sourcing and screening to communication and onboarding — every part of the recruitment workflow is tied to ATS apps. 

Research shows that 78% of recruiters using an ATS report that it has improved the quality of the candidates they hire. 

Hiring qualified talent for an organization can be a resource intensive and long drawn process. The entire recruitment workflow has multiple steps and layers, which when accomplished manually can be extremely time consuming. However, companies which leverage recruitment workflow automation by using ATS APIs can save 100s of hours spent in heavy lifting. 

Recruitment workflow and automation with ATS APIs

Let’s start with understanding the various stages of recruitment workflow and how automation with ATS APIs can help. 

Job requisition and posting

The first step involves creating job requisitions based on hiring needs across different teams. This is followed by creating appropriate job descriptions and posting on job boards to attract candidates. 

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With ATS APIs, this entire process can be automated. ATS APIs come with pre-defined templates to create job requisitions and job descriptions. They also have integrations with leading job boarding to facilitate automatic posting and role promotion of job boards. 

Candidate sourcing and screening

Next, most recruitment professionals focus on collecting data on candidate profiles from different job boards. Then, they engage in screening and shortlisting the resumes following a manual process, which takes a long time. 

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ATS APIs automate the collection of candidate data, resume and other basic information. It goes a step beyond with resume parsing to automate extraction of relevant candidate data from the resume and facilitate storage in a ready to use format for easy screening. 

Interview scheduling

Once the screening is complete, interview scheduling for the shortlisted candidates is the next step. Manually, the process requires a lot of back and forth with interviewers and interviewees, managing schedules, sending invitations and reminders, etc. 

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ATS APIs led automation takes care of all scheduling struggles and automates the process of sending invitations, reminders and other candidate communication in the process. 

Candidate assessment

Scheduling interviews/ tests is followed by conducted assessments to gauge the candidate's aptitude, skills, knowledge, personality and cognitive abilities for the role. 

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ATS APIs can easily automate test assessment via online proctored solutions and even record scores and present it to the decision makers in a streamlined and easy to understand format. 

Decision making

When it comes to decision making, ATS APIs can collate evaluation, assessment results and feedback of all candidates and even rank them based on comprehensive scores to help decision makers with data-driven insights on the best candidate for the role. 

Job offer and onboarding

Once a candidate has been selected, the ATS API can automatically send the offer letter based on pre-defined templates. Acceptance of the offer letter by the candidate can automatically trigger document signing digitally, thereby automating the entire onboarding process. Bi-directional data sync will ensure that all steps of employee onboarding are conducted automatically. 

Managing information

An ATS API also enables recruitment professionals to automatically capture, manage and update all the relevant information about the candidate, application and status in a common platform, which can be accessed as and when needed. 

Candidate communication

Throughout the recruitment workflow, there are several touchpoints with the candidate. ATS API: can help recruitment professionals with personalized communication templates for candidates based on their application status, interview performance, feedback, etc. 

Post-recruitment evaluation

Finally, the ATS API can provide recruitment professionals with key data points and metrics to gauge recruitment performance. Metrics like time to hire, source, open positions, candidate diversity, interview to hire ratio, can all be collated in one report by the ATS API and presented. 

Process of automating the recruitment workflow with ATS APIs 

With understanding of the recruitment workflow, let’s understand the process of automating the same with ATS API. 

Identify the recruitment stages to automate

To begin with, you need to understand the recruitment stages in your organization and identify the ones which require a lot of heavy lifting and can be automated. For instance, while conducting the interviews cannot be automated, scheduling them and compiling the feedback and evaluation can be. Thus, identify the stages to automate and what benefits you seek to achieve as a result of automation. 

Choose the ATS APIs 

There are multiple ATS APIs in the market today. While each one of them comes with multiple functionalities across the recruitment workflow, some are likely to be better over others for particular use cases. Therefore, to leverage automation with ATS API, choose the ones that best suit your industry and requirements. You might even choose multiple ATS APIs and integrate them to your system for different purposes, while also integrating one with another. 

Obtain the necessary API credentials from the ATS provider.

Once you have selected the ATS APIs, it’s time to get into the technical aspects of getting the integration in place. To integrate the ATS API, you need to get access to specific credentials and authentication from the ATS provider. These include API key, access tokens, client ID, client secret, endpoints, etc. Once you have these, only then can the integration process begin. Also, ensure you understand the authentication process well.  

Integrate with the ATS APIs

Once you have the necessary credentials, get started with the integration. This will require coding and engineering effort as you will be building the integration from scratch. Understand the data models, endpoints, authorization by going through the API documentation for each ATS API you choose. Simultaneously get started with data mapping, authentication, error handling, etc. followed by testing to gauge the effectiveness of your integration. Each integration can take anywhere between a few weeks to a few months. 

Monitor, manage and maintain your ATS APIs

Post integration, you need to keep track of your data exchange and transformation process. Ensure that data synchronization is happening as per your expectations. Your need to keep track of unstable APIs or any updates in the same, error logging challenges, expiry or deactivation of webhooks, management of large data volume, among others. At the same time, monitor any security threats or unauthorized access push. 

Optimize processes

Finally, optimize your ATS API integration process. Identify the major challenges from the maintenance and management standpoint and focus on fixing the issues to create a better integration experience for your teams. 

Limitations of using different ATS APIs for automating recruitment workflow  

While using multiple ATS APIs to power different functionalities is enticing, it can be challenging and a major burden on your engineering and other teams. Here are a few limitations that might face while trying to integrate different ATS API for recruitment workflow automation. 

Scale and optimization challenges 

Each ATS API comes with different data fields, documentation and processes that need to be followed for integration. Integrating each one requires a steep learning curve for the engineering team. From a resource standpoint, each ATS API integration can take an average of four weeks, costing ~USD 10K. As you scale, there is an exponential time and monetary cost that comes along, which is applicable to each API you add. After a certain time, chances are that the costs and efforts associated with integration scale will significantly surpass the savings and benefits from automation. 

Data transformation challenges 

Each API, even within the same category of ATS will have different data models. For instance, the field of candidate name may be categorized as cand_name for one ATS API, while candidate_name for another one. To ensure that data from all APIs is consolidated for processing, you need to engage in data normalization and data transformation to process the data from different ATS APIs. 

Data synchronization challenges 

Next, data synchronization in real time can be a big challenge. If you are using a polling infrastructure, you will have to request data sync time and again, that too across multiple APIs. At the same time, data sync can be a challenge with scalability, when the data load becomes unmanageable. The inability to facilitate real time data synchronization can lead to delays in the entire recruitment process or exclusion of applications during a particular round. 

Monitoring and management 

Error handling, monitoring and management is extremely resource intensive. It is extremely important to maintain the health of your integrations, by constantly logging their performance. It is important to keep track of API calls, log errors, data sync requests, etc. This is required to catch any potential errors early on and manage integrations better. However, monitoring each API for every second is manually very burdensome. 

Compliance and security challenges

Compliance and security is a big challenge when it comes to integrations. Since you are dealing with a lot of personal data, you need to be on your toes when it comes to security. At the same time, each API will have a different authentication methodology as well as separate policies that you need to keep pace with.  

Custom workflows 

Finally, you might need custom workflows from your ATS APIs, especially during data exchange between them. Building these custom workflows can be an engineering nightmare, let alone maintaining and monitoring them. 

How unified API can help integrate with multiple ATS APIs for recruitment automation 

Don’t get apprehensive about using different ATS APIs for automating your recruitment workflows. A unified API like Knit can help you integrate different ATS APIs effortlessly and in less than half the time. Here are the top benefits of using a unified API.

Easy scalability

Unified API enables you to scale product integrations faster. You can easily add hundreds of ATS applications to your systems by just learning about the unified API. You no longer have to go through the API documentation of multiple applications or understand the nuances, processes, etc. It is highly time and cost effective from a scale and optimization lens.  

Seamless data transformation with custom fields

A unified API like Knit can provide you with a common data model. You can easily eliminate the data transformation nuances and complex processes for different APIs. It enables you to map different data schemas from different ATS applications into a single, unified data model as normalized data. In addition, you can also incorporate custom data fields i.e. you can access any non-standard data you need, which may not be included in the common ATS data model.

Real time data sync

Following a webhooks based event driven architecture, unified APIs like Knit ensure real time data sync. Without the need for any polling infrastructure or request, Knit facilitates assured real time data sync, irrespective of the data load. Furthermore, it also sends automatic notifications and alerts when new data has been updated. 

High security

Knit, as a unified API, helps companies leveraging ATS integration ensure high levels of security. It is the only unified API which doesn’t store a copy of the customer data. Furthermore, being 100% webhook-based architecture, it facilitates greater security. You don’t have to navigate through different security policies for different APIs and can access OAuth, API key or a username-password based authentication. Finally, all data with our unified API is doubly encrypted, when in rest and when in transit. 

Easy integration management

With a unified API like Knit, integration management also becomes seamless. It enables you to monitor and manage all ATS integrations using a detailed Logs, Issues, Integrated Accounts and Syncs page. ‍Furthermore, the fully searchable Logs keep track of API calls, data syncs and requests and status of each webhook registered. This effectively streamlines integration management and error resolution 5x faster. 

TL:DR

Recruitment professionals and leaders involved in different stages of the recruitment lifecycle can leverage ATS integrations to automate their workflows. With the right ATS API, each stage of the recruitment workflow can be automated to a certain extent to save time and effort. However, building and maintaining different ATS API can be challenging with issues of scale, data transformation, synchronization, etc. Fortunately, with a unified API, companies can address these issues for seamless scalability, data transformation with a unified data model supported by custom data fields, high security with double encryption, webhook architecture for real time data sync, irrespective of workload and easy integration management with detailed logs, issues, etc.  Get started with a unified API to integrate all your preferred ATS applications to automate and streamline your recruitment workflows.

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Marketing automation tools are like superchargers for marketers, propelling their campaigns to new heights. Yet, there's a secret ingredient that can take this power to the next level: the right audience data. 

What better than an organization’s CRM to power it? 

The good news is that many marketing automation tools are embracing CRM API integrations to drive greater adoption and results. However, with the increasing number of CRM systems underplay, building and managing CRM integrations is becoming a huge challenge. 

Fortunately, the rise of unified CRM APIs is bridging this gap, making CRM integration seamless for marketing automation tools. But, before delving into how marketing automation tools can power integrations with unified CRM APIs, let’s explore the business benefits of CRM APIs. 

10 ways marketing automation tools can maximize results with CRM API integration

Here’s a quick snapshot of how CRM APIs can bring out the best of marketing automation tools, making the most of the audience data for customers. 

1. Customer segmentation and content personalization  

Research shows that 72% of customers will only engage with personalized messaging. CRM integration with marketing automation tools can enable the users to create personalized messaging based on customer segmentation. 

Users can segment customers based on their likelihood of conversion and personalize content for each campaign. Slicing and dicing of customer data, including demographics, preferences, interactions, etc. can further help in customizing content with higher chances of consumption and engagement. Customer segmentation powered by CRM API data can help create content that customers resonate with. 

2. Enhanced lead nurturing for higher conversion 

CRM integration provides the marketing automation tool with every tiny detail of every lead to adjust and customize communication and campaigns that facilitate better nurturing. At the same time, real time conversation updates from CRM can help in timely marketing follow-ups for better chances of closure. 

2. Churn prediction and customer retention

As customer data from CRM and marketing automation tools is synched in real time, any early signs of churn like reduced engagement or changed consumer behavior can be captured. 

Real time alerts can also be automatically updated in the CRM for sales action. At the same time, marketing automation tools can leverage CRM data to predict which customers are more likely to churn and create specific campaigns to facilitate retention. 

3. Upsell and cross-sell campaigns

Users can leverage customer preferences from the CRM data to design campaigns with specific recommendations and even identify opportunities for upselling and cross-selling. 

For instance, customers with high engagement might be interested in upgrading their relationships and the marketing automation tools can use this information and CRM details on their historical trends to propose best options for upselling. 

Similarly, when details of customer transactions are captured in the CRM, they can be used to identify opportunities for complementary selling with dedicated campaigns. This leads to a clear increased revenue line. 

4. Automated campaign workflow to reduce operational overheads

In most marketing campaigns as the status of a lead changes, a new set of communication and campaign takes over. With CRM API integration, marketing automation tools can easily automate the campaign workflow in real time as soon as there is a status change in the CRM. This ensures greater engagement with the lead when their status changes. 

5. Event triggered campaigns for faster TAT

Marketing communication after events is an extremely important aspect of sales. With CRM integration in marketing automation tools, automated post-event communication or campaigns can be triggered based on lead status for attendance and participation in the event. 

This facilitates a faster turnaround time for engaging the customers just after the event, without any delays due to manual follow ups. 

6. Lead source automation

The integration can help automatically map the source of the lead from different marketing activities like webinars, social media posts, newsletters, etc. in your CRM to understand where your target audience engagement is higher. 

At the same time, it can facilitate tagging of leads to the right teams or personnels for follow ups and closures. With automated lead source tracking, users can track the ROI of different marketing activities. 

7. Tailored social media campaigns and multi-channel marketing

With CRM API integration, users can get access to customer preference insights to define their social media campaigns and audience. At the same time, they can customize scheduling based on customer’s geographical locations from CRM to facilitate maximum efficiency. 

8. Data enrichment for enhancing lead profiles

With bi-directional sync, CRM API integration with marketing automation tools can lead to enhancement of lead profiles. With more and more lead data coming in across both the platforms, users can have a rich and comprehensive profile of their customers, updates in real time across the CRM and marketing tools. 

9. Lifecycle marketing automation

Overall, integrating CRM API with marketing automation tools can help in automating the entire marketing lifecycle. It starts with getting a full customer view to stage-based automated marketing campaigns to personalized nurturing and lead scoring, predictive analytics and much more. Most of the aspects of marketing based on the sales journey of the customer can be automated and triggered in real time with CRM changes. 

10. Customer reporting and analytics for decision making

Data insights from CRM API integrated with those from marketing automation tools can greatly help in creating reports to analyze and track customer behavior. 

It can help ensure to understand consumer trends, identify the top marketing channels, improve customer segmentation and overall enhance the marketing strategy for more engagement. 

Real-world Struggles of CRM Integration in Marketing Automation

While the benefits of CRM API integration with marketing automation tools are many, there are also some roadblocks on the way. Since each CRM API is different and your customers might be using different CRM systems, building and maintaining a plethora of CRM APIs can be challenging due to:

Data transformation inconsistency and campaign blunders

When data is exchanged between two applications, it needs to undergo transformation to become normalized with data fields compatible across both. Since each CRM API has diverse data models, syntax and nuances, inconsistency during data transfer is a big challenge. 

If the data is not correctly normalized or transformed, chances are it might get corrupt or lost, leading to gaps in integration. At the same time, any inconsistency in data transformation and sync might lead to sending incorrect campaigns and triggers to customers, compromising on the experience. 

Delays in campaigns 

While inconsistency in data transformation is one challenge, a related concern comes in the form of delays or limited real-time sync capabilities. 

If the data sync between the CRM and the marketing automation tool is not happening in real time (across all CRMs being used), chances are that communication with end customers is being delayed, which can lead to loss of interest and lower engagement. 

Customer data privacy and security concerns

Any CRM is the beacon of sensitive customer data, often governed by GDPR and other compliances. However, integration and data transfer is always vulnerable to security threats like man in the middle attacks, DDoS, etc. which can lead to compromised privacy. This can lead to monetary and reputational risks. 

Scalability 

With the increasing number of CRM applications, scalability of integration becomes a huge challenge. Building new CRM integrations can be very time and resource consuming — building one integration from scratch can take up to 3 months or more — which either means compromising on the available CRM integrations or choking of engineering bandwidth. 

Moreover, as integrated CRM systems increase, the requirements for API calls and data exchange also grow exponentially, leading to delays in data sync and real time updates with increased data load. Invariably, scalability becomes a challenge.  

Integration management

Managing and maintaining integrations is a big challenge in itself. When end customers are using integrations, there are likely to be issues that require immediate action. 

At the same time, maintaining detailed logs, tracking API calls, API syncs manually can be very tedious. However, any lag in this can crumble the entire integration system. 

Vendor management

Finally, when integrating with different CRM APIs, managing the CRM vendors is a big challenge. Understanding API updates, managing different endpoints, ensuring zero downtime, error handling and coordinating with individual response teams is highly operational and time consuming. 

How Unified CRM API ensures maximum integration ROI

Don’t let the CRM API integration challenges prevent you from leveraging the multiple benefits mentioned above. A unified CRM API like the one offered by Knit, can help you access the benefits without breaking sweat over the challenges. 

If you want to know the technical details of how a unified API works, this will help

Integrate in minutes with multiple CRM APIs

A unified CRM API facilitates integration with marketing automation tools within minutes, not months, which is usually what it takes to build integrations. 

At the same time, it enables connecting with various CRM applications in one go. When it comes to Knit, marketing automation tools have to simply embed Knit’s UI component in their frontend to get access to Knit’s full catalog of CRM applications.

Consistent data transfer guaranteed with normalized data models

A unified CRM API can address all data transformation and normalization challenges easily. For instance, with Knit, different data models, nuances and schemas across CRM applications are mapped into a single and unified data model, facilitating data normalization in real time. 

At the same time, Knit allows users to map custom data fields to access non-standard data. 

Real time campaigns and data exchange

The right unified CRM API can help you sync data in real time, without any external polling requests. 

Take Knit for example, its webhooks and events driven architecture periodically polls data from all CRM applications, normalizing them and making them ready for use by the marketing automation tool. The latter doesn’t have to worry about the engineering intensive tasks of polling data, managing API calls, rate limits, data normalization, etc. 

Furthermore, this ensures that as soon as details about a customer are updated on the CRM, the associated campaigns or triggers are automatically set in motion for marketing success. 

Never miss a data update

There can be multiple CRM updates within a few minutes and as data load increases, a unified CRM API ensures guaranteed data sync in real time. As with Knit, its in-built retry mechanisms facilitate resilience and ensure that the marketing automation tools don’t miss out on any CRM updates, even at scale, as each lead is important. 

Moreover, as a user, you can set up sync frequency as per your convenience.

Scale as you go

With a unified CRM API, you only need to integrate once. As mentioned above, once you embed the UI component, every time you need to use a new CRM application or a new CRM API is added to Knit’s catalog, you can access it automatically with sync capabilities, without spending any engineering capabilities from your team. 

This ensures that you can scale in the most resource-lite and efficient manner, without diverting engineering productivity from your core product. From a data sync perspective as well, a unified CRM API ensures guaranteed scalability, irrespective of the data load. 

Security at scale

One of the biggest concerns of security and vulnerability to cyberattacks can be easily addressed with a unified CRM API across multiple facts. Let’s take the security provisions of Knit for example. 

• First, Knit ensures double encryption, i.e. it encrypts data at rest as well as when in transit for exchange. It also encrypts data with an additional layer of application security.
• Second, Knit is the only unified API that doesn’t store any copy of the data and acts as a pure passthrough proxy. Data is only processed in Knit’s server and is directly sent to the customer’s webhooks. Protection of end-user data like this helps you easily gain customer confidence during sales conversations.
• Third, Knit has wide ranging authorization capabilities, including, OAuth, API key or a username-password based authentication. Irrespective of what authorization protocol the vendor has, it can integrate with Knit.

Catch potential errors early on

Finally, integration management to ensure that all your CRM APIs are healthy is well taken care of by a unified CRM API. 

• A unified CRM API like Knit provides access to a detailed Logs, Issues, Integrated Accounts and Syncs page for all integrations to monitor and track them along with possible RCA and solutions. This empowers your CX team to solve customer issues immediately without involving the tech team.
• Furthermore, it enables you to track every API call, data sync, etc. as well as the status of webhooks registered for real time visibility in errors — ensuring that you are always on top of your data and minimizes the chances of any errors.  

Constant monitoring and on demand customer support

Finally, when you are using a unified API, you don’t have to deal with multiple vendors, endpoints, etc. Rather, the heavy lifting is done by the unified CRM API provider. 

For instance, with Knit, you can access 24/7 support to securely manage your integrations. It also provides detailed documentation, links and easy to understand product walkthroughs for your developers and end users to ensure a smooth integration process.

Get started with unified CRM API

If you are looking to integrate multiple CRM APIs with your product, get your Knit API keys and see unified API in action. (Getting started with Knit is completely free)

You can also talk to one of our experts to see how you can customize Knit to solve your specific integration challenges.

In the world of APIs, it's not enough to implement security measures and then sit back, hoping everything stays safe. The digital landscape is dynamic, and threats are ever-evolving. 

Why do you need to monitor your APIs regularly

Real-time monitoring provides an extra layer of protection by actively watching API traffic for any anomalies or suspicious patterns.

For instance - 

• It can spot a sudden surge in requests from a single IP address, which could be a sign of a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack. 
• It can also detect multiple failed login attempts in quick succession, indicating a potential brute-force attack. 

In both cases, real-time monitoring can trigger alerts or automated responses, helping you take immediate action to safeguard your API and data.

API Logging

Now, on similar lines, imagine having a detailed diary of every interaction and event within your home, from visitors to when and how they entered. Logging mechanisms in API security serve a similar purpose - they provide a detailed record of API activities, serving as a digital trail of events.

Logging is not just about compliance; it's about visibility and accountability. By implementing logging, you create a historical archive of who accessed your API, what they did, and when they did it. This not only helps you trace back and investigate incidents but also aids in understanding usage patterns and identifying potential vulnerabilities.

To ensure robust API security, your logging mechanisms should capture a wide range of information, including request and response data, user identities, IP addresses, timestamps, and error messages. This data can be invaluable for forensic analysis and incident response. 

API monitoring

Combining logging with real-time monitoring amplifies your security posture. When unusual or suspicious activities are detected in real-time, the corresponding log entries provide context and a historical perspective, making it easier to determine the extent and impact of a security breach.

Based on factors like performance monitoring, security, scalability, ease of use, and budget constraints, you can choose a suitable API monitoring and logging tool for your application.

Access Logs and Issues in one page

This is exactly what Knit does. Along with allowing you access to data from 50+ APIs with a single unified API, it also completely takes care of API logging and monitoring. 

It offers a detailed Logs and Issues page that gives you a one page historical overview of all your webhooks and integrated accounts. It includes a number of API calls and provides necessary filters to choose your criterion. This helps you to always stay on top of user data and effectively manage your APIs.

Ready to build?

Get your API keys to try these API monitoring best practices for real

If you are looking to unlock 40+ HRIS and ATS integrations with a single API key, check out Knit API. If not, keep reading

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Note: This is our master guide on API Pagination where we solve common developer queries in detail with common examples and code snippets. Feel free to visit the smaller guides linked later in this article on topics such as page size, error handling, pagination stability, caching strategies and more.

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In the modern application development and data integration world, APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) serve as the backbone for connecting various systems and enabling seamless data exchange. 

However, when working with APIs that return large datasets, efficient data retrieval becomes crucial for optimal performance and a smooth user experience. This is where API pagination comes into play.

In this article, we will discuss the best practices for implementing API pagination, ensuring that developers can handle large datasets effectively and deliver data in a manageable and efficient manner. (We have linked bite sized how-to guides on all API pagination FAQs you can think of in this article. Keep reading!)

But before we jump into the best practices, let’s go over what is API pagination and the standard pagination techniques used in the present day.

What is API Pagination

API pagination refers to a technique used in API design and development to retrieve large data sets in a structured and manageable manner. When an API endpoint returns a large amount of data, pagination allows the data to be divided into smaller, more manageable chunks or pages. 

Each page contains a limited number of records or entries. The API consumer or client can then request subsequent pages to retrieve additional data until the entire dataset has been retrieved.
Pagination typically involves the use of parameters, such as offset and limit or cursor-based tokens, to control the size and position of the data subset to be retrieved. 

These parameters determine the starting point and the number of records to include on each page.

Advantages of API Pagination

By implementing API pagination, developers as well as consumers can have the following advantages - 

1. Improved Performance

Retrieving and processing smaller chunks of data reduces the response time and improves the overall efficiency of API calls. It minimizes the load on servers, network bandwidth, and client-side applications.

2. Reduced Resource Usage 

Since pagination retrieves data in smaller subsets, it reduces the amount of memory, processing power, and bandwidth required on both the server and the client side. This efficient resource utilization can lead to cost savings and improved scalability.

3. Enhanced User Experience

Paginated APIs provide a better user experience by delivering data in manageable portions. Users can navigate through the data incrementally, accessing specific pages or requesting more data as needed. This approach enables smoother interactions, faster rendering of results, and easier navigation through large datasets.

4. Efficient Data Transfer

With pagination, only the necessary data is transferred over the network, reducing the amount of data transferred and improving network efficiency.

5. Scalability and Flexibility

Pagination allows APIs to handle large datasets without overwhelming system resources. It provides a scalable solution for working with ever-growing data volumes and enables efficient data retrieval across different use cases and devices.

6. Error Handling

With pagination, error handling becomes more manageable. If an error occurs during data retrieval, only the affected page needs to be reloaded or processed, rather than reloading the entire dataset. This helps isolate and address errors more effectively, ensuring smoother error recovery and system stability.

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Common examples of paginated APIs 

Some of the most common, practical examples of API pagination are: 

• Platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram often employ paginated APIs to retrieve posts, comments, or user profiles. 
• Online marketplaces such as Amazon, eBay, and Etsy utilize paginated APIs to retrieve product listings, search results, or user reviews.
• Banking or payment service providers often provide paginated APIs for retrieving transaction history, account statements, or customer data.
• Job search platforms like Indeed or LinkedIn Jobs offer paginated APIs for retrieving job listings based on various criteria such as location, industry, or keywords.

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API pagination techniques

There are several common API pagination techniques that developers employ to implement efficient data retrieval. Here are a few useful ones you must know:

1. Offset and limit pagination
2. Cursor-based pagination
3. Page-based pagination
4. Time-based pagination
5. Keyset pagination

Read: Common API Pagination Techniques to learn more about each technique

Best practices for API pagination

When implementing API pagination in Python, there are several best practices to follow. For example,  

1. Use a common naming convention for pagination parameters

Adopt a consistent naming convention for pagination parameters, such as "offset" and "limit" or "page" and "size." This makes it easier for API consumers to understand and use your pagination system.

2. Always include pagination metadata in API responses

Provide metadata in the API responses to convey additional information about the pagination. 

This can include the total number of records, the current page, the number of pages, and links to the next and previous pages. This metadata helps API consumers navigate through the paginated data more effectively.

For example, here’s how the response of a paginated API should look like -

        
{
 "data": [
   {
     "id": 1,
     "title": "Post 1",
     "content": "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet.",
     "category": "Technology"
   },
   {
     "id": 2,
     "title": "Post 2",
     "content": "Praesent fermentum orci in ipsum.",
     "category": "Sports"
   },
   {
     "id": 3,
     "title": "Post 3",
     "content": "Vestibulum ante ipsum primis in faucibus.",
     "category": "Fashion"
   }
 ],
 "pagination": {
   "total_records": 100,
   "current_page": 1,
   "total_pages": 10,
   "next_page": 2,
   "prev_page": null
 }
}
        
    

3. Determine an appropriate page size

Select an optimal page size that balances the amount of data returned per page. 

A smaller page size reduces the response payload and improves performance, while a larger page size reduces the number of requests required.

Determining an appropriate page size for a paginated API involves considering various factors, such as the nature of the data, performance considerations, and user experience. 

Here are some guidelines to help you determine the optimal page size.

Read: How to determine the appropriate page size for a paginated API 

4. Implement sorting and filtering options

Provide sorting and filtering parameters to allow API consumers to specify the order and subset of data they require. This enhances flexibility and enables users to retrieve targeted results efficiently. Here's an example of how you can implement sorting and filtering options in a paginated API using Python:

        
# Dummy data
products = [
    {"id": 1, "name": "Product A", "price": 10.0, "category": "Electronics"},
    {"id": 2, "name": "Product B", "price": 20.0, "category": "Clothing"},
    {"id": 3, "name": "Product C", "price": 15.0, "category": "Electronics"},
    {"id": 4, "name": "Product D", "price": 5.0, "category": "Clothing"},
    # Add more products as needed
]


@app.route('/products', methods=['GET'])
def get_products():
    # Pagination parameters
    page = int(request.args.get('page', 1))
    per_page = int(request.args.get('per_page', 10))


    # Sorting options
    sort_by = request.args.get('sort_by', 'id')
    sort_order = request.args.get('sort_order', 'asc')


    # Filtering options
    category = request.args.get('category')
    min_price = float(request.args.get('min_price', 0))
    max_price = float(request.args.get('max_price', float('inf')))


    # Apply filters
    filtered_products = filter(lambda p: p['price'] >= min_price and p['price'] <= max_price, products)
    if category:
        filtered_products = filter(lambda p: p['category'] == category, filtered_products)


    # Apply sorting
    sorted_products = sorted(filtered_products, key=lambda p: p[sort_by], reverse=sort_order.lower() == 'desc')


    # Paginate the results
    start_index = (page - 1) * per_page
    end_index = start_index + per_page
    paginated_products = sorted_products[start_index:end_index]


    return jsonify(paginated_products)

        
    

5. Preserve pagination stability

Ensure that the pagination remains stable and consistent between requests. Newly added or deleted records should not affect the order or positioning of existing records during pagination. This ensures that users can navigate through the data without encountering unexpected changes.

Read: 5 ways to preserve API pagination stability

6. Handle edge cases and error conditions

Account for edge cases such as reaching the end of the dataset, handling invalid or out-of-range page requests, and gracefully handling errors. 

Provide informative error messages and proper HTTP status codes to guide API consumers in handling pagination-related issues.

Read: 7 ways to handle common errors and invalid requests in API pagination

7. Consider caching strategies

Implement caching mechanisms to store paginated data or metadata that does not frequently change. 

Caching can help improve performance by reducing the load on the server and reducing the response time for subsequent requests.

Here are some caching strategies you can consider: 

1. Page level caching

Cache the entire paginated response for each page. This means caching the data along with the pagination metadata. This strategy is suitable when the data is relatively static and doesn't change frequently.

2. Result set caching

Cache the result set of a specific query or combination of query parameters. This is useful when the same query parameters are frequently used, and the result set remains relatively stable for a certain period. You can cache the result set and serve it directly for subsequent requests with the same parameters.

3. Time-based caching

Set an expiration time for the cache based on the expected freshness of the data. For example, cache the paginated response for a certain duration, such as 5 minutes or 1 hour. Subsequent requests within the cache duration can be served directly from the cache without hitting the server.

4. Conditional caching

Use conditional caching mechanisms like HTTP ETag or Last-Modified headers. The server can respond with a 304 Not Modified status if the client's cached version is still valid. This reduces bandwidth consumption and improves response time when the data has not changed.

5. Reverse proxy caching

Implement a reverse proxy server like Nginx or Varnish in front of your API server to handle caching. 

Reverse proxies can cache the API responses and serve them directly without forwarding the request to the backend API server. 

This offloads the caching responsibility from the application server and improves performance.

Simplify API pagination 

In conclusion, implementing effective API pagination is essential for providing efficient and user-friendly access to large datasets. But it isn’t easy, especially when you are dealing with a large number of API integrations.

Using a unified API solution like Knit ensures that your API pagination requirements is handled without you requiring to do anything anything other than embedding Knit’s UI component on your end. 

Once you have integrated with Knit for a specific software category such as HRIS, ATS or CRM, it automatically connects you with all the APIs within that category and ensures that you are ready to sync data with your desired app. 

In this process, Knit also fully takes care of API authorization, authentication, pagination, rate limiting and day-to-day maintenance of the integrations so that you can focus on what’s truly important to you i.e. building your core product.

By incorporating these best practices into the design and implementation of paginated APIs, Knit creates highly performant, scalable, and user-friendly interfaces for accessing large datasets. This further helps you to empower your end users to efficiently navigate and retrieve the data they need, ultimately enhancing the overall API experience.

Sign up for free trial today or talk to our sales team

If you are looking to unlock 40+ HRIS and ATS integrations with a single API key, check out Knit API. If not, keep reading

‍

Note: This is a part of our series on API Pagination where we solve common developer queries in detail with common examples and code snippets. Please read the full guide here where we discuss page size, error handling, pagination stability, caching strategies and more.

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Ensure that the pagination remains stable and consistent between requests. Newly added or deleted records should not affect the order or positioning of existing records during pagination. This ensures that users can navigate through the data without encountering unexpected changes.

5 ways for pagination stability

To ensure that API pagination remains stable and consistent between requests, follow these guidelines:

1. Use a stable sorting mechanism

If you're implementing sorting in your pagination, ensure that the sorting mechanism remains stable. 

This means that when multiple records have the same value for the sorting field, their relative order should not change between requests. 

For example, if you sort by the "date" field, make sure that records with the same date always appear in the same order.

2. Avoid changing data order

Avoid making any changes to the order or positioning of records during pagination, unless explicitly requested by the API consumer. 

If new records are added or existing records are modified, they should not disrupt the pagination order or cause existing records to shift unexpectedly.

3. Use unique and immutable identifiers

It's good practice to use unique and immutable identifiers for the records being paginated. T

This ensures that even if the data changes, the identifiers remain constant, allowing consistent pagination. It can be a primary key or a unique identifier associated with each record.

4. Handle record deletions gracefully

If a record is deleted between paginated requests, it should not affect the pagination order or cause missing records. 

Ensure that the deletion of a record does not leave a gap in the pagination sequence.

For example, if record X is deleted, subsequent requests should not suddenly skip to record Y without any explanation.

5. Use deterministic pagination techniques

Employ pagination techniques that offer deterministic results. Techniques like cursor-based pagination or keyset pagination, where the pagination is based on specific attributes like timestamps or unique identifiers, provide stability and consistency between requests.

Also Read: 5 caching strategies to improve API pagination performance

Top 5 Alternatives to tryfinch

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TL:DR:

Finch is a leading unified API player, particularly popular for its connectors in the employment systems space, enabling SaaS companies to build 1: many integrations with applications specific to employment operations. This translates to the ease for customers to easily leverage Finch’s unified connector to integrate with multiple applications in HRIS and payroll categories in one go. Invariably, owing to Finch, companies find connecting with their preferred employment applications (HRIS and payroll) seamless, cost-effective, time-efficient, and overall an optimized process. While Finch has the most exhaustive coverage for employment systems, it's not without its downsides - most prominent being the fact that a majority of the connectors offered are what Finch calls “assisted” integrations. Assisted essentially means a human-in-the-loop integration where a person has admin access to your user's data and is manually downloading and uploading the data as and when needed.

Pros and cons of Finch

Why chose Finch (Pros)

● Ability to scale HRIS and payroll integrations quickly

● In-depth data standardization and write-back capabilities

● Simplified onboarding experience within a few steps

However, some of the challenges include(Cons):

● Most integrations are human-assisted instead of being true API integrations

● Integrations only available for employment systems

● Limited flexibility for frontend auth component

● Requires users to take the onus for integration management

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Pricing: Starts at $35/connection per month for read only apis; Write APIs for employees, payroll and deductions are available on their scale plan for which you’d have to get in touch with their sales team.

Now let's look at a few alternatives you can consider alongside finch for scaling your integrations

Finch alternative #1: Knit

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Knit is a leading alternative to Finch, providing unified APIs across many integration categories, allowing companies to use a single connector to integrate with multiple applications. Here’s a list of features that make Knit a credible alternative to Finch to help you ship and scale your integration journey with its 1:many integration connector:

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Pricing: Starts at $2400 Annually

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Here’s when you should choose Knit over Finch:

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● Wide horizontal and deep vertical coverage: Knit not only provides a deep vertical coverage within the application categories it supports, like Finch, however, it also supports a wider horizontal coverage of applications, higher than that of Finch. In addition to applications within the employment systems category, Knit also supports a unified API for ATS, CRM, e-Signature, Accounting, Communication and more. This means that users can leverage Knit to connect with a wider ecosystem of SaaS applications.

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● Events-driven webhook architecture for data sync: Knit has built a 100% events-driven webhook architecture, which ensures data sync in real time. This cannot be accomplished using data sync approaches that require a polling infrastructure. Knit ensures that as soon as data updates happen, they are dispatched to the organization’s data servers, without the need to pull data periodically. In addition, Knit ensures guaranteed scalability and delivery, irrespective of the data load, offering a 99.99% SLA. Thus, it ensures security, scale and resilience for event driven stream processing, with near real time data delivery.

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● Data security: Knit is the only unified API provider in the market today that doesn’t store any copy of the customer data at its end. This has been accomplished by ensuring that all data requests that come are pass through in nature, and are not stored in Knit’s servers. This extends security and privacy to the next level, since no data is stored in Knit’s servers, the data is not vulnerable to unauthorized access to any third party. This makes convincing customers about the security potential of the application easier and faster.

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● Custom data models: While Knit provides a unified and standardized model for building and managing integrations, it comes with various customization capabilities as well. First, it supports custom data models. This ensures that users are able to map custom data fields, which may not be supported by unified data models. Users can access and map all data fields and manage them directly from the dashboard without writing a single line of code. These DIY dashboards for non-standard data fields can easily be managed by frontline CX teams and don’t require engineering expertise.  

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● Sync when needed: Knit allows users to limit data sync and API calls as per the need. Users can set filters to sync only targeted data which is needed, instead of syncing all updated data, saving network and storage costs. At the same time, they can control the sync frequency to start, pause or stop sync as per the need.

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● Ongoing integration management: Knit’s integration dashboard provides comprehensive capabilities. In addition to offering RCA and resolution, Knit plays a proactive role in identifying and fixing integration issues before a customer can report it. Knit ensures complete visibility into the integration activity, including the ability to identify which records were synced, ability to rerun syncs etc.

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As an alternative to Finch, Knit ensures:

● No-Human in the loop integrations

● No need for maintaining any additional polling infrastructure

● Real time data sync, irrespective of data load, with guaranteed scalability and delivery

● Complete visibility into integration activity and proactive issue identification and resolution

● No storage of customer data on Knit’s servers

● Custom data models, sync frequency, and auth component for greater flexibility

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Finch alternative #2: Merge

Another leading contender in the Finch alternative for API integration is Merge. One of the key reasons customers choose Merge over Finch is the diversity of integration categories it supports.

Pricing: Starts at $7800/ year and goes up to $55K

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Why you should consider Merge to ship SaaS integrations:

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● Higher number of unified API categories; Merge supports 7 unified API categories, whereas Finch only offers integrations for employment systems

● Supports API-based integrations and doesn’t focus only on assisted integrations (as is the case for Finch), as the latter can compromise customer’s PII data

● Facilitates data sync at a higher frequency as compared to Finch; Merge ensures daily if not hourly syncs, whereas Finch can take as much as 2 weeks for data sync

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However, you may want to consider the following gaps before choosing Merge:

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● Requires a polling infrastructure that the user needs to manage for data syncs

● Limited flexibility in case of auth component to customize customer frontend to make it similar to the overall application experience

● Webhooks based data sync doesn’t guarantee scale and data delivery

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Finch alternative #3: Workato

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Workato is considered another alternative to Finch, albeit in the traditional and embedded iPaaS category.

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Pricing: Pricing is available on request based on workspace requirement; Demo and free trial available

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Why you should consider Workato to ship SaaS integrations:

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● Supports 1200+ pre-built connectors, across CRM, HRIS, ticketing and machine learning models, facilitating companies to scale integrations extremely fast and in a resource efficient manner

● Helps build internal integrations, API endpoints and workflow applications, in addition to customer-facing integrations; co-pilot can help build workflow automation better

● Facilitates building interactive workflow automations with Slack, Microsoft Teams, with its customizable platform bot, Workbot

However, there are some points you should consider before going with Workato:

● Lacks an intuitive or robust tool to help identify, diagnose and resolve issues with customer-facing integrations themselves i.e., error tracing and remediation is difficult

● Doesn’t offer sandboxing for building and testing integrations

● Limited ability to handle large, complex enterprise integrations

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Finch alternative #4: Paragon

Paragon is another embedded iPaaS that companies have been using to power their integrations as an alternative to Finch.

Pricing: Pricing is available on request based on workspace requirement;

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Why you should consider Paragon to ship SaaS integrations:

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● Significant reduction in production time and resources required for building integrations, leading to faster time to market

● Fully managed authentication, set under full sets of penetration and testing to secure customers’ data and credentials; managed on-premise deployment to support strictest security requirements

● Provides a fully white-labeled and native-modal UI, in-app integration catalog and headless SDK to support custom UI

However, a few points need to be paid attention to, before making a final choice for Paragon:

● Requires technical knowledge and engineering involvement to custom-code solutions or custom logic to catch and debug errors

● Requires building one integration at a time, and requires engineering to build each integration, reducing the pace of integration, hindering scalability

● Limited UI/UI customization capabilities

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Finch alternative #5: Tray.io

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Tray.io provides integration and automation capabilities, in addition to being an embedded iPaaS to support API integration.

Pricing: Supports unlimited workflows and usage-based pricing across different tiers starting from 3 workspaces; pricing is based on the plan, usage and add-ons

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Why you should consider Tary.io to ship SaaS integrations:

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● Supports multiple pre-built integrations and automation templates for different use cases

● Helps build and manage API endpoints and support internal integration use cases in addition to product integrations

● Provides Merlin AI which is an autonomous agent to build automations via chat interface, without the need to write code

However, Tray.io has a few limitations that users need to be aware of:

● Difficult to scale at speed as it requires building one integration at a time and even requires technical expertise

● Data normalization capabilities are rather limited, with additional resources needed for data mapping and transformation

● Limited backend visibility with no access to third-party sandboxes

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TL:DR

We have talked about the different providers through which companies can build and ship API integrations, including, unified API, embedded iPaaS, etc. These are all credible alternatives to Finch with diverse strengths, suitable for different use cases. Undoubtedly, the number of integrations supported within employment systems by Finch is quite large, there are other gaps which these alternatives seek to bridge:

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● Knit: Providing unified apis for different categories, supporting both read and write use cases. A great alternative which doesn’t require a polling infrastructure for data sync (as it has a 100% webhooks based architecture), and also supports in-depth integration management with the ability to rerun syncs and track when records were synced.

● Merge: Provides a greater coverage for different integration categories and supports data sync at a higher frequency than Finch, but still requires maintaining a polling infrastructure and limited auth customization.

● Workato: Supports a rich catalog of pre-built connectors and can also be used for building and maintaining internal integrations. However, it lacks intuitive error tracing and remediation.

● Paragon: Fully managed authentication and fully white labeled UI, but requires technical knowledge and engineering involvement to write custom codes.

● Tray.io: Supports multiple pre-built integrations and automation templates and even helps in building and managing API endpoints. But, requires building one integration at a time with limited data normalization capabilities.

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Thus, consider the following while choosing a Finch alternative for your SaaS integrations:

● Support for both read and write use-cases

● Security both in terms of data storage and access to data to team members

● Pricing framework, i.e., if it supports usage-based, API call-based, user based, etc.

● Features needed and the speed and scope to scale (1:many and number of integrations supported)

Depending on your requirements, you can choose an alternative which offers a greater number of API categories, higher security measurements, data sync (almost in real time) and normalization, but with customization capabilities.

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As hiring needs for organizations become more complex, assessing candidates in a holistic and comprehensive manner is more critical than ever. Fortunately, multiple assessment software have surfaced in the recent past, enabling organizations to carry out assessments in the most effective and efficient manner. Leveraging technology, gamification and other advances, such tools are able to help organizations ensure that a candidate is a perfect fit for the role, skills, company culture and all other parameters. 

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However, to make the best use of assessment software, it is important to integrate data and information from them across other platforms being used for operational efficiency and faster turnaround in recruitment and onboarding. Here, assessment API integration plays a major role. 

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When organizations integrate data from the assessment API with other applications, including ATS, HRIS, interview scheduling, etc., they are able to optimize their recruitment workflow with a high degree of automation. 

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In this article, we will discuss the different aspects of assessment API, its integration use cases, key data models and the different ways in which you can accomplish seamless integration. 

Assessment API Data Models

To ensure that you understand the different assessment APIs well, it is important to comprehend the data models or fields that are commonly used. One of the major reasons that the knowledge of data models is imperative is to facilitate data transformation and normalization during data sync. Here are the common data models for assessment APIs:

Candidate name

This data model focuses on the name of the candidate to whom a particular assessment will be administered and all records pertaining to the candidate will be stored. It can also be associated with a unique candidate ID to prevent any confusion in case of duplication of names. 

Candidate profile

The next data model captures the profile of the candidate. From an assessment software perspective, the focus is on a candidate’s professional profile, prior work experience, qualifications, certifications, competencies, etc. Such details help in determining the right assessments for each candidate based on their experience and the role for which they are being assessed.  

Candidate contact information

This data field keeps the details or contact information for all candidates, including phone number, email address, etc. The contact information ensures that the candidate’s can be easily informed about their assessment schedule, any changes in the schedule, results, status, etc. it facilitates smooth communication between the assessment software and the candidate. 

Candidate profile picture

Most assessment software capture candidate pictures to ensure authenticity during assessments or training. Candidate profile pictures in assessment software databases help the latter to prevent proxy attendance during interviews or assessments and address any potential foul play. 

Job type

The next data model captures the nature of employment or the type of job. Today, in addition to full-time employees, organizations are increasingly hiring consultants, gig workers and even contractual employees. The assessment requirements for each one of them can be varied. Thus, the assessment software has a data model to capture the job type to ensure appropriate assessments. 

Job information

Assessment API captures job information or job details as an important data model. Put simply, this model has all details about the role being assessed for, the requirements, skills, competencies, and other aspects which need to be assessed. As a data model or field, job information contains all aspects of the job that need to be matched when candidates are assessed. 

Job department and managers

Next in line is the data model which focuses on the job department and managers. This particular field captures the department for which the candidate has applied for and the hiring managers. The details of hiring managers are important because the results of the assessment tests have to be sent to them. 

Assessment stages

Most assessment software have a few stages that a candidate undergoes. It can start from a normal personality test and go on to psychometric evaluations, coding tests, to personal interviews. As a data model, assessment stages help hiring managers understand where the candidates stand in the hiring pipeline and how close or far they are from closing a particular role at hand. 

Assessment list

The next data model captures all the types of assessments that are available as a part of the assessment software. This field has a repository of different assessments that can be administered. 

Scorecard

Once the assessment is administered, an important data model is the scorecard. This captures how the candidate performed for a particular assessment. The scorecard format or type can be different and unique for each assessment type. In some, it can be an absolute and objective score, while some others might give a more subjective outcome, determining the suitability of the candidate for the role. 

Assessment result

The assessment result as a data model captures the final verdict for the candidate. More often than not, hiring managers can update the result as selected, rejected or any other based on the scorecard and other evaluations undertaken, post which the data can be integrated into the next workflow software. 

Assessment attachment

This data field or data model captures any attachments that come along with a particular assessment test. Some tests might require candidates to submit their assessments as an attachment or external document. This field contains all such attachments which can be consulted during final hiring decisions. 

Assessment status

The assessment status data model captures the status of the assessment test for a particular candidate. It captures if the test has been provided to the candidate, whether or not they have completed the same, etc. 

Top Assessment Applications

Now that there is a clear understanding of the different assessment software data models, let’s quickly look at some of the top assessment applications available in the market today, which can be integrated with different software like ATS, HRIS, LMS, etc. 

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Assessment API Integration: Top Use Cases

Assessment software is a part of the larger ecosystem of software that companies today use to manage their people's operations. Invariably, there are several other tools and software in the market today, which when integrated with assessment APIs can lead to operational efficiency and smooth HR and related processes. There are several categories of tools out there which either feed data into assessment APIs (write APIs) or get access to data from assessment APIs (read APIs). Integration ensures that such data syncs are automated and do not require any manual interview, which can be prone to errors, time consuming and operationally taxing. Here are some of the top use cases for assessment API integration across different software. 

Assessment API integration for ATS tools

Assessment API integration is very critical for ATS or applicant tracking systems. ATS tools and platforms have all the required information about candidates, including their name, profile, pictures, contact information, etc. Assessment API integration with ATS tools ensures that the assessment read API can get access to all these details automatically without any manual intervention. At the same time, integration also facilitates real-time information updation in assessment tools, which can set up assessments for new applicants almost immediately. This leads to faster turnaround. Furthermore, the assessment write APIs can feed information back to the ATS tools with the assessment results and scorecards to help update the candidate’s status in the recruitment flow. 

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Examples: Greenhouse Software, Workable, BambooHR, Lever, Zoho

Assessment API integration for candidate screening tools

Candidate screening tools help organizations determine whether or not a candidate is ideal or right for the role in question. Integration with assessment software ensures that data about a candidate’s performance in an assessment test is automatically synced for screening managers to assess the skills, competencies and abilities of the candidate and its relevance to the open position. Furthermore, assessment API integration with candidate screening tools ensures that the latter have real time access to candidate assessment results for immediate hiring decision making, based on evidence backed data for smart hiring. 

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Examples: 

Assessment API integration for HRIS tools

Assessment API integration with HRIS tools is a no brainer. Once a candidate clears the assessments and is offered a job at an organization, it is essential to capture the results from the assessments in the HRIS platform. Here, the assessment write APIs play an important role. They help HR teams get access to all the relevant information about an employee based on different personality, psychometric, behavioral, cognitive tests to help them capture employee records which are robust and comprehensive. Automated integration of data from assessment tools to HRIS platforms ensures that no human error or bias crawls in when assessment data is being entered into HRIS portals. Furthermore, since many parts of an assessment test can be sensitive, such integration ensures that data exchange is confidential and on a need to know basis only. 

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Examples: BambooHR, Namely, SAP SuccessFactors, Gusto

Assessment API integration for interview scheduling tools

Most companies today leverage interview scheduling tools to automate their entire interview processes, including blocking calendars, managing schedules, etc. For interview scheduling tools, integration with assessment APIs is important to ensure that all interviews with candidates can be scheduled effectively, keeping in my mind both interviewer and interviewee schedules. Interview scheduling tools can leverage assessment read APIs to understand the assessment availability and dates to schedule the interview. Furthermore, once the interview is scheduled, assessment write APIs can help provide updates on whether or not the candidate attended the interview, status, next steps to help interview scheduling tools effectively conduct interactions with candidates as needed. 

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Examples: Calendly, Sense, GliderAI, YouCanBookMe, Paradox

Assessment API integration for LMS tools 

While most assessment software have use cases in the pre-employment stages, their utility can also transcend into post employment phases as well. The LMS tools can easily leverage assessment read APIs to understand the type of assessment tests available which can be used for internal training purposes. Furthermore, candidate performance in pre-employment assessment tests can be used as a baseline to define the types of training required and areas for upskilling. Overall, this integration can help identify the learning needs for the organization and clarify the assessments available for further investigation. At the same time, once the assessments are administered, the assessment write API can automatically sync the relevant data and results for post employment assessment on whether or not employees participated in the assessments, results, gaps, etc. to the LMS tools for better decision making on employee training and development. 

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Example: TalentLMS, 360Learning, Docebo, Google Classroom 

Assessment API integration for talent management tools

Talent management and workforce planning tools are integral when it comes to succession planning for any organization. Assessments conducted, both pre and post employment can greatly help in determining the talent needs for any organization. Talent management tools can leverage assessment read APIs to understand how their existing or potential talent is performing along areas critical to the organization. Any gaps in the talent or consistent poor performance in a particular area of assessment can then be identified to adopt corrective measures. Assessment API integration can help talent management tools effectively understand the talent profile in their organization, which can further help in better succession planning and talent analytics. 

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Examples: ClearCompany, Deel, ActivTrak

Unified Assessment API Integration: All You Need to Know

There are several ways companies can achieve assessment API integration to suit their use cases. Right from building integrations in-house for each assessment tool to practices like workflow automation tools, there are several ways to integrate. However, as the number of customers and integration needs increase exponentially, going for a unified assessment API for integration is the best move. Here are a few instances when choosing a unified API for assessment software integration makes sense. Use unified assessment API when you:

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• Wish to integrate with multiple assessment software based on your customer needs and developing point to point integration with each one is not viable
• Have a large customer base and their integration requests for new assessment software is increasing
• Need to deliver integrations in a short span of time and you lack dedicated engineering bandwidth in-house
• Want to achieve assessment API integration at a lower cost with faster time to market
• Don’t want to take the burden of ongoing maintenance and management of each integration
• Want to skip the effort that goes into reading through API documentation for each integration
• Want to normalize data across assessment platforms and ensure that this transformation process is 10X faster than you internal processes
• Want to ensure complete security, especially due to the nature of sensitive information in question
• Seek real-time sync and exchange of data for immediate action or the flexibility to customize syncs as per your needs
• Want to skip the process of learning about different authentication keys, rate limits, etc. for different APIs

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Now that you know a unified assessment API is the best and the most effective for you to build integrations with assessment software, go through the following questions to choose the best unified assessment API for your organization. 

What are the data models?

The ideal unified API normalizes and syncs data into a unified data model and facilitates data transformation 10x faster. While most fields are common and a unified model works, choose a unified assessment API which also gives you the flexibility to add some custom data models which may not align with the standard data models available. 

What are the rate limits?

Each unified API will offer rate limits, which is the number of API requests or data sync requests you can make in a given period of time. Having an optimum rate limit is extremely important. Having a very high rate limit, in which many requests can be made can lead to potential DDoS attacks and other vulnerabilities. Whereas, having a very low rate limit, where only a handful API requests can be made, might lead to inefficiencies and data inaccuracies. Therefore, gauge the rate limits offered to check if they align with your needs or if they can be customized for you. 

How secure is the integration process?

Next, any unified assessment API you choose should be high on security. On the one hand, check for compliance with all certifications and global standards. On the other hand, look out for comprehensive data encryption, which involves encrypting data at rest and in transit. When looking at security, do check the level of authentication and authorization available.  

What kind of post integration support is available?

Building integrations is followed by the operationally and technically draining tasks of managing integrations. Integration maintenance and management can take anywhere between 5-10 hours of your engineering bandwidth. Therefore, choose a unified assessment API provider which provides you with maintenance support. You should be able to manage the health of all your integrations with a robust track of all API calls, requests, etc. 

What is the sync frequency?

As data sync is the most important part of assessment API integration, check the sync frequency offered by the unified API. While real-time sync, powered by a webhook architecture which ensures real-time data transfer, without any polling infrastructure is ideal. It is equally important to have something which can be customized and allows you to set the sync frequency as per your needs. 

How easy is it to scale?

The key purpose of a unified assessment API is to scale as fast as possible and ensure all customer assessment tools are integrated with. Therefore, you must check the breadth of assessment API integrations being offered. At the same time, explore how open and forthcoming the unified API provider is to custom integrations for you if needed. This also needs to be weighted against the time taken for each new integration and any cost associated with the same. 

Can it take a high data load?

Finally, as you add more assessment API integrations and the number of customers using the same increase, the data load for sync will experience an exponential rise. Thus, your unified assessment API must facilitate guaranteed scalability with quality sync, irrespective of the data load. Without the same, there are chances of data corruption. 

Knit: Unified Assessment API

As a leading unified assessment API, Knit has the right tick mark for all the considerations mentioned above and much more. Here’s why you should consider Knit for your assessment API integration needs:

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• Unified data model which normalizes data with option to customize some fields
• Double encryption of data with encryption for PII and user credentials
• Compliance with  SOC2, GDPR, ISO27001
• No storage of a copy of any data that passes through Knit
• Webhook architecture for real time data sync irrespective of data load
• Option to customize sync frequency whenever needed
• Availability of OAuth, API key or a username-password based authentication
• Bi-directional data sync to read and write from any assessment software
• Detailed Logs, Issues, Integrated Accounts and Syncs page for integration management

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Book a demo today to learn about the other ways in which Knit can be your ideal unified assessment API partner, how it works and anything else you need to know!

Wrapping up: TL:DR

Integrating with assessment APIs can help different companies and platforms unlock value to better streamline their operations. Assessment API integration can facilitate bi-directional sync of data between assessment tools and other applications. While there are several ways to achieve such integration, a unified API is one of the top contenders as it facilitates data normalization, high levels of security, guaranteed scalability, seamless maintenance and management and real time data syncs. 

As organizations grow in revenue and people strength, a lot of data comes into existence that needs to be managed well for business success. With more people being onboarded, most HR teams struggle to manage all processes, especially where employee data is concerned. 

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Invariably, different HR tools and software or HRIS (Human Resources Information Software) get adopted to automate certain parts of the workflow. 

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Research shows that larger companies with over 500 employees often choose HRIS to consolidate systems. 

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With the increasing number of HR tools and overall use cases, organizations need to integrate these software with one another and their core application to ensure seamless flow of information. Here, HRIS integration plays a major role. 

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This article seeks to provide a complete understanding on HRIS API integration, focusing on different concepts, data models, use cases and how to achieve it in the most efficient and effective way. 

Key Concepts

Here are some of the key concepts or terminologies you should understand before moving onto more details on the applications, use cases, etc. 

Directory

Directory platforms essentially are the single source of truth for all employees, especially the new joiners. It ensures that when an employee joins, they have access to all the resources, tools and software they need. Employees can leverage the Directory to familiarize themselves with different aspects of the organization. 

Payroll

Payroll refers to everything related to the compensation aspect for employees. It helps companies calculate the salary due to employees at the end of every month, taxes, benefits, etc. It ensures that employees are accurately compensated based on their agreements, while also complying with statutory laws and policies. 

Benefits

In most structured organizations, employees are entitled to additional benefits beyond the compensation. This includes health insurance, accidental insurance, retirement plans, provident fund (India), paid time off, etc. All these come under the benefits section of an employment contract and need to be carefully monitored. 

Recruitment, retention and retirement

Any HRIS API that you come across will address all or some aspects of the employee lifecycle. Here, you should understand the basics of recruitment, which involves attracting and hiring the best talent for your open roles, retention, which focuses on ensuring that you are able to prevent attrition and turnover for your employees by facilitating the right culture, fair pay, etc. and finally, retirement or exit, either due to completion of tenure, age or any other reason. 

Learning and development

Another concept that requires attention is learning and development. It caters to understanding the learning and training needs for your employees, both hard and soft skills and adequately providing the right upskilling opportunities for professional success. 

HRIS Integration: Top Use Cases

Let’s quickly understand how HRIS integration across HR software and tools leads to an exemplary employee experience as well as facilitates operational efficiency for HR teams. Most of the use cases of HRIS integration follow the read and write HRIS APIs which ensure automatic syncing of data between the HRIS platforms and allied applications. Put simply, manually entry of data across applications and updates can be prone to human errors. However, even a single inaccuracy in updating data can lead to serious consequences, including faulty payroll creation, absence tracking, etc. Furthermore, manual data entry might lead to unauthorized data access, especially for sensitive employee information. Here’s a quick snapshot of how HRIS integration can be used across different scenarios.

HRIS integration for ATS tools

ATS or applicant tracking system can leverage HRIS integration to ensure that all important and relevant details about new employees, including name, contact information, demographic and educational backgrounds, etc. are automatically updated into the customer’s preferred HRIS tool without the need to manually entering data, which can lead to inaccuracies and is operationally taxing. ATS tools leverage the write HRIS API and provide data to the HR tools in use.   

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Examples: Greenhouse Software, Workable, BambooHR, Lever, Zoho

HRIS integration for payroll software

Payroll software plays an integral role in any company’s HR processes. It focuses on ensuring that everything related to payroll and compensation for employees is accurate and up to date. HRIS integration with payroll software enables the latter to get automated and real time access to employee data including time off, work schedule, shifts undertaken, payments made on behalf of the company, etc. 

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At the same time, it gets access to employee data on bank details, tax slabs, etc. Together, this enables the payroll software to deliver accurate payslips to its customers, regarding the latter’s employees. With automated integration, data sync can be prone to errors, which can lead to faulty compensation disbursal and many compliance challenges. HRIS integration, when done right, can alert the payroll software with any new addition to the employee database in real time to ensure setting up of their payroll immediately. At the same time, once payslips are made and salaries are disbursed, payroll software can leverage HRIS integration to write back this data into the HR software for records. 

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Examples: Gusto, RUN Powered by ADP, Paylocity, Rippling

HRIS integration for employee onboarding/ offboarding software

Employee onboarding software uses HRIS integration to ensure a smooth onboarding process, free of administrative challenges. Onboarding tools leverage the read HRIS APIs to get access to all the data for new employees to set up their accounts across different platforms, set up payroll, get access to bank details, benefits, etc. With HRIS integrations, employee onboarding software can provide their clients with automated onboarding support without the need to manually retrieve data for each new joiner to set up their systems and accounts. Furthermore, HRIS integration also ensures that when an employee leaves an organization, the update is automatically communicated to the onboarding software to push deprovisioning of the systems, and services. This also ensures that access to any tools, files, or any other confidential access is terminated. Manually deprovisioning access can lead to some manual errors, and even cause delays in exit formalities. 

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Examples: Deel, Savvy, Sappling

Ease of communication and announcements

With the right HRIS integration, HR teams can integrate all relevant data and send out communication and key announcements in a centralized manner. HRIS integrations ensure that the announcements reach all employees on the correct contact information without the need for HR teams to individually communicate the needful. 

HRIS integration for LMS tools

LMS tools leverage both the read and write HRIS APIs. On the one hand, they read or get access to all relevant employee data including roles, organizational structure, skills demand, competencies, etc. from the HRIS tool being used. Based on this data, they curate personalized learning and training modules for employees for effective upskilling. Once the training is administered, the LMS tools again leverage HRIS integrations to write data back into the HRIS platform with the status of the training, including whether or not the employee has completed the same, how did they perform, updating new certifications, etc. Such integration ensures that all learning modules align well with employee data and profiles, as well as all training are captured to enhance the employee’s portfolio. 

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Example: TalentLMS, 360Learning, Docebo, Google Classroom

HRIS integration for workforce management and scheduling tools 

Similar to LMS, workforce management and scheduling tools utilize both read and write HRIS APIs. The consolidated data and employee profile, detailing their competencies and training undertaken can help workforce management tools suggest the best delegation of work for companies, leading to resource optimization. On the other hand, scheduling tools can feed data automatically with HRIS integration into HR tools about the number of hours employees have worked, their time off, free bandwidth for allocation, shift schedules etc. HRIS integration can help easily sync employee work schedules and roster data to get a clear picture of each employee’s schedule and contribution. 

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Examples: QuickBooks Time, When I Work

HRIS integration for benefits administration tools

HRIS integration for benefits administration tools ensures that employees are provided with the benefits accurately, customized to their contribution and set parameters in the organization. Benefits administration tools can automatically connect with the employee data and records of their customers to understand the benefits they are eligible for based on the organizational structure, employment type, etc. They can read employee data to determine the benefits that employees are entitled to. Furthermore, based on employee data, they feed relevant information back into the HR software, which can further be leveraged by payroll software used by the customers to ensure accurate payslip creation. 

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Examples: TriNet Zenefits, Rippling, PeopleKeep, Ceridian Dayforce

HRIS integration for workforce planning tools

Workforce planning tools essentially help companies identify the gap in their talent pipeline to create strategic recruitment plans. They help understand the current capabilities to determine future hiring needs. HRIS integration with such tools can help automatically sync the current employee data, with a focus on organizational structure, key competencies, training offered, etc. Such insights can help workforce planning tools accurately manage talent demands for any organization. At the same time, real time sync with data from HR tools ensures that workforce planning can be updated in real time. 

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Examples: ClearCompany, Deel, ActivTrak

HRIS API Data Models

The different HRIS tools you use are bound to come with different data models or fields which will capture data for exchange between applications. It is important for HR professionals and those building and managing these integrations to understand these data models, especially to ensure normalization and transformation of data when it moves from one application to another. 

Employees/ Employee Profiles

This includes details of all employees whether full time or contractual, including first and last name, contact details, date of birth, email ID, etc. At the same time, it covers other details on demographics and employment history including status, start date, marital status, gender, etc. In case of a former employee, this field also captures termination date. 

Employee Contact Details

This includes personal details of the employee, including personal phone number, address, etc. which can be used to contact employees beyond work contact information. 

Employee Profile Picture

Employee profile picture object or data model captures the profile picture of the employees that can be used across employee records and purposes. 

Employment Type

The next data model in discussion focuses on the type or the nature of employment. An organization can hire full time employees, contractual workers, gig workers, volunteers, etc. This distinction in employment type helps differentiate between payroll specifications, taxation rules, benefits, etc. 

Location

Location object or data model refers to the geographical area for the employee. Here, both the work location as well as the residential or native/ home location of the employee is captured. This field captures address, country, zip code, etc. 

Leave Request

Leave request data model focuses on capturing all the time off or leave of absence entries made by the employee. It includes detailing the nature of leave, time period, status, reason, etc.

Leave Balance

Each employee, based on their nature of employment, is entitled to certain time off in a year. The leave balance object helps organizations keep a track of the remaining balance of leave of absence left with the employee. With this, organizations can ensure accurate payroll, benefits and compensation. 

Attendance 

This data model captures the attendance of employees, including fields like time in, time out, number of working hours, shift timing, status, break time, etc. 

Organizational Structure

Each organization has a hierarchical structure or layers which depict an employee’s position in the whole scheme of things. The organizational structure object helps understand an employee’s designation, department, manager (s), direct reportees, etc. 

Bank Details

This data model focuses on capturing the bank details of the employee, along with other financial details like a linked account for transfer of salary and other benefits that the employee is entitled to. In addition, it captures routing information like Swift Code, IFSC Code, Branch Code, etc. 

Dependents

Dependents object focuses on the family members of an employee or individuals who the employee has confirmed as dependents for purposes of insurance, family details, etc. This also includes details of employees’ dependents including their date of birth, relation to the employee, among others. 

KYC

This includes the background verification and other details about an employee with some identification proof and KYC (know your customer) documents. This is essential for companies to ensure their employees are well meaning citizens of the country meeting all compliances to work in that location. It captures details like Aadhar Number, PAN Number or unique identification number for the KYC document. 

Compensation

This data model captures all details related to compensation for an employee, including total compensation/ cost to company, compensation split, salary in hand, etc. It also includes details on fixed compensation, variable pay as well as stock options. Compensation object also captures the frequency of salary payment, pay period, etc. 

Unified HRIS API Integration: Get Started

By now, it would be clear to you that there are several HRIS tools in the market today that companies use and need to integrate with one another to ensure smooth exchange of data and consistency in records across platforms. However, manually implementing integrations between APIs of individual platforms can be extremely time consuming and resource intensive. In such a case, you can rely on a unified API like Knit, which gives you a single HRIS API to integrate with. Once you integrate with the HRIS API, you automatically get integrated with all the HR platforms you use. 

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Before moving on to the best practices to choose the right Unified HRIS API integration platform, here are some quick reasons why you should choose one:

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• Requires integration with a common unified API to connect with a plethora of HRIS software used by different customers
• Supports common integration logic, endpoints, pagination which is easy to understand
• Normalizes and transforms data into a unified data model with possibility of having custom fields for smooth data sync
• Can facilitate real time data sync between the application offered and HRIS software with instant alerts
• Tales care of integration maintenance and management with logging and error detection
• Significantly lower cost and time requirements, ability to integrate with multiple HRIS platforms within days to a few weeks
• Common documentation and need to understand only one API than toggling between documentation of all HRIS APIs
• Need to deal with only one form of authentication, rate limits, pagination, etc. 

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Here are some points that you should always consider while choosing the right unified HRIS API for your company:

Understand the documentation

Start by gauging whether or not the unified API provides comprehensive and easy to understand documentation for integration. One of the key reasons to choose a unified API is to prevent the effort of navigating through individual documentation for each integration you need. Therefore, getting the right documentation, which covers everything you need is important. The documentation will also help you understand the integration logic being followed, including REST vs SOAP, and end points like  GET, POST, and PATCH, provision of free sandbox, etc. 

Which authentication model is followed?

Next, understand the authentication model that the unified API provides. Essentially, there are a few major types of authentication, including, 

• Basic Auth that requires an API key or password for access
• OAuth 2.0 which relies on token exchanges
• Username-password based authentication

The right authentication and authorization is important since it will directly impact the privacy and security of the data you exchange between integrations. 

What are the rate limits?

Rate limits are simply the number of API requests that can be made in a defined period of time. They are generally set to prevent cyber attacks like DDoS attacks which come in the form of exponential unleashing of API requests. Having a lower threshold of rate limit, but with expected high rate of requests can lead to unexpected unified API behavior. Ensure that your unified API provider can customize rate limits to address your and your customer needs.  

Do you get post integration support?

HRIS API integration doesn’t end with building the integrations. There is a lot which goes on once the integrations are under use. There can be errors in data transformation, zombie APIs, API keys breaking or expiring, bad data being returned, long running syncs, troubleshooting challenges, and more. Your unified API needs to provide you with exceptional maintenance and management support, taking care of any challenge that comes along. At the same time, the error messages should be easy to decipher for your customer success team to ultimately address the queries. 

How secure are the integrations?

Undoubtedly, security of your HRIS API integration is critical to your business operations. Thus, choose a unified API provider which is security-first. Gauge the level of encryption it offers, We have already talked about authentication. Don’t forget to check for security protocols, certifications and compliances which are adhered by the unified API for maximum resilience. 

Knit: Unified HRIS API

Knit is a unified HRIS API provider that enables companies to implement native HRIS integrations to streamline and optimize HR processes. When you integrate with Knit, you get:

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• One unified API to connect with all HRIS tools you need
• Single unified data model for seamless data normalization and exchange
• Compliance to the highest security standards like SOC2, GDPR, ISO27001, HIPAA
• Option to authenticate the way you want, including, OAuth, API key or a username-password based authentication
• 100% webhooks architecture that send out notification whenever updated data is available
• Guaranteed scalability and delivery of HR data irrespective of data load
• High level of security as Knit doesn’t store a copy of your data
• Option to read and write data from any app from any HRIS category
• Option to limit data sync and API calls to only what you need
• Double encryption when in transit and when at rest with addition PII layer
• Detailed Logs, Issues, Integrated Accounts and Syncs page to easily monitor HRIS integrations
• Custom fields to manage any non-standard HRIS data

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Knit, as a unified HRIS API ensures a high ROI for companies which seek to integrate their diverse HRIS applications to make their HR processes effective, without sinking their organizational budgets. 

Wrapping up: TL:DR

To conclude, it is quite evident that HRIS integration is a must have for any growing HR team which is looking to work with several HR tools to manage different parts of the process. However, building and managing integrations in-house can be quite intensive in terms of investments and engineering team involvement. Fortunately, with a unified HRIS API, companies only need to integrate once with a unified API key and connect with all HRIS applications, with high levels of security, guaranteed scalability, seamless data normalization, integration management and real time sync.

Organizations today adopt and deploy various applications, to make their work simpler, more efficient and enhance overall productivity. However, in most cases, the process of connecting with these applications is complex, time consuming and an ineffective use of the engineering team. Fortunately, over the years, different approaches or platforms have seen a rise, enabling companies to integrate applications for their internal use or to create customer facing interfaces. 

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In this article, we will discuss the different options available for companies to integrate with SaaS applications. We will detail the diverse approaches for different needs and use cases, along with a comparative analysis between the different platforms within each approach to help you make an informed choice. 

Types of SaaS integrations

As mentioned above, particularly, there are two types of SaaS integrations that most organizations use or need. Here’s a quick understanding of both:

Internal use integrations

Internal use integrations are generally created between two applications that a company uses or between internal systems to facilitate seamless and data flow. Consider that a company uses BambooHR as its HRMS systems and stores all its HR data there, while using ADPRun to manage all of its payroll functions. An internal integration will help connect these two applications to facilitate information flow and data exchange between them. 

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For instance, with integration, any new employee that is onboarded in BambooHR will be automatically reflected in ADPRun with all relevant details to process compensation at the end of the pay period. Similarly, any employees who leave will be automatically deleted, ensuring that the data across platforms being used internally is consistent and up to date. 

Customer facing integrations

On the other hand, customer-facing integrations are intrinsically created between your product and the applications used by your customer to facilitate seamless data exchange for maximum efficiency in operations. It ensures that all data updated in your customer’s application is synced with your product with high reliability and speed. 

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Let’s say that you offer candidate communication services for your customers. Using customer-facing integrations, you can easily connect with the ATS application that your customer uses to ensure that whenever there is any movement in the application status for any candidate, you promptly communicate to the candidate on the next steps. This will not only ensure regular flow of communication with the candidate, but will also eliminate any missed opportunities with real time data sync. 

Best SaaS integration platforms for different use cases

With differences in purposes and use cases, the best approach and platforms for different integrations also varies. Put simply, most internal integrations require automation of workflow and data exchange, while customer facing ones need more sophisticated functionalities. Even with the same purpose, the needs of developers and organizations can be varied, creating the need for diverse platforms which suit varying requirements. In the following section, we will discuss the three major kinds of integration platforms, including workflow automation tools, embedded iPaaS and unified APIs with specific examples within each. 

Internal integrations: Workflow automation tools/ iPaaS 

Essentially, internal integration tools are expected to streamline the workflow and data exchange between internally used applications for an organization to improve efficiency, accuracy and process optimization. Workflow automation tools or iPaaS are the best SaaS integration platforms to support this purpose. They come with easy to use drag and drop functionalities, along with pre-built connectors and available SDKs to easily power internal integrations. Some of the leaders in the space are:

Workato

An enterprise grade automation platform, Workato facilitates workflow automation and integration, enabling businesses to seamlessly connect different applications for internal use. 

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Benefits of Workato

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• High number of pre-built connectors, making integration with any tool seamless
• Enterprise grade security functionalities, like encryption, role-based access, audit logs for data protection
• No-code/ low code iPaaS experience; option to make own connectors with simple SDKs

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Limitations of Workato 

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• Expensive for organizations with budget constraints
• Limited offline functionality

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Ideal for enterprise-level customers that need to integrate with 1000s of applications with a key focus on security. 

Zapier

An iSaaS (integration software as a service) tool, Zapier allows software users to integrate with applications and automate tasks which are relatively simple, with Zaps. 

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Benefits of Zapier

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• Easily accessible and can be used by non-technical teams to automate simple tasks via Zaps using a no code UI
• Provides 7000+ pre-built connectors and automation templates
• Has recently introduced a co-pilot which allows users to build their own Zaps using natural language

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Limitations of Zapier

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• Runs the risk of introducing security risks into the system
• Relatively simple and may not support complex or highly sophisticated use cases

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Ideal for building simple workflow automations which can be developed and managed by all teams at large, using its vast connector library. 

Mulesoft

Mulesoft is a typical iPaaS solution that facilitates API-led integration, which offers easy to use tools to help organizations automate routine and repetitive tasks.

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Benefits of Mulesoft

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• High focus on integration with Salesforce and Salesforce products, facilitating automation with CRM effectively
• Offers data integration, API management, and analytics with Anytime Platform
• Provides a powerful API gateway for security and policy management

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Limitations of Mulesoft

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• Requires a steep learning curve as it is technically complex
• Higher on the pricing, making it unsuitable for smaller organizations

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Ideal for more complex integration scenarios with enterprise-grade features, especially for integration with Salesforce and allied products. 

Dell Boomi

With experience of powering integrations for multiple decades, Dell Boomi provides tools for iPaaS, API management and master data management. 

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Benefits of Dell Boomi

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• Comes with a simple UI and multiple pre-built connectors for popular applications
• Can help with diverse use cases for different teams
• Adopted by several large enterprises due to their experience in the space

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Limitations of Dell Boomi

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• Requires more technical expertise than some other workflow automation tools
• Support is limited to simpler integrations and may not be able to support complex scenarios

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Ideal for diverse use cases and comes with a high level of credibility owing to the experience garnered over the years. 

SnapLogic

The final name in the workflow automation/ iPaaS list is SnapLogic which comes with a low-code interface, enabling organizations to quickly design and implement application integrations. 

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Benefits of SnapLogic

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• Simple UI and low-code functionality ensures that users from technical and non-technical backgrounds can leverage it
• Comes with a robust catalog of pre-built connectors to integrate fast and effectively
• Offers on-premise, cloud based on hybrid models of integration

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Limitations of SnapLogic

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• May be a bit too expensive for small size organizations with budget constraints
• Scalability and optimal performance might become an issue with high data volume

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Ideal for organizations looking for automation workflow tools that can be used by all team members and supports functionalities, both online and offline. 

Customer facing integrations: Embedded iPaaS & Unified API

While the above mentioned SaaS integration platforms are ideal for building and maintaining integrations for internal use, organizations looking to develop customer facing integrations need to look further. Companies can choose between two competing approaches to build customer facing SaaS integrations, including embedded iPaaS and unified API. We have outlined below the key features of both the approaches, along with the leading SaaS integration platforms for each. 

Embedded iPaaS

An embedded iPaaS can be considered as an iPaaS solution which is embedded within a product, enabling companies to build customer-facing integrations between their product and other applications. This enables end customers to seamlessly exchange data and automate workflows between your application and any third party application they use. Both the companies and the end customers can leverage embedded iPaaS to build integration and automate workflows. Here are the top embedded iPaaS that companies use as SaaS integrations platforms. 

Workato Embedded

In addition to offering an iPaaS solution for internal integrations, Workato embedded offers embedded iPaaS for customer-facing integrations. It is a low-code solution and also offers API management solutions.

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Benefits of Workato Embedded

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• Highly extensive connector library with 1200+ pre-built connectors and built-in workflow actions
• Enterprise grade embedded iPaaS with sophisticated security and compliance standards

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Limitations of Workato Embedded

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• Requires customers to build each customer facing integration separately, making it resource and time intensive
• Lacks a standard data model, making data transformation and normalization complicated
• Cost ineffective for smaller companies and offers limited offline connectivity

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Ideal for large companies that wish to offer a highly robust integration library to their customers to facilitate integration at scale. 

Paragon

Built exclusively for the embedded iPaaS use case, Paragon enables users to ship and scale native integrations.

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Benefits of Paragon

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• Offers effective monitoring features, including event and failure alerts and logs, and enables users to access the full underlying API (developer friendly)
• Facilitates on-premise deployment, especially, for users with highly sensitive data and privacy needs
• Ensures fully managed authentication and user management with the Paragon SDK

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Limitations of Paragon

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• Fewer connectors are readily available, as compared to market average
• Pushes customers to create their own integrations from scratch in certain cases

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Ideal for companies looking for greater monitoring capabilities along with on-premise deployment options in the embedded iPaaS. 

Pandium

Pandium is an embedded iPaaS which also allows users to embed an integration marketplace within their product. 

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Benefits of Pandium

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• The embedded integration marketplace (which can be white-labeled) allows customers and prospects to find all integrations at one place
• Helps companies outsource the development and management of integrations
• Provides key integration analytics

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Limitations of Pandium

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• Limited catalog of connectors as compared to other competitors
• Requires technical expertise to use, blocking engineering bandwidth
• Forces users to build one integration at a time, making the scalability limited

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Ideal for companies that require an integration marketplace which is highly customizable and have limited bandwidth to build and manage integrations in-house. 

Tray Embedded

As an embedded iPaaS solution, Tray Embedded allows companies to embed its iPaaS solution into their product to provide customer-facing integrations. 

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Benefits of Tray Embedded

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• Provides a large number of connectors and also enables customers to request and get a new connector built on extra charges
• Offers an API management solution to to design and manage API endpoints
• Provides Merlin AI, an autonomous agent, powering simple automations via a chat interface

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Limitations of Tray Embedded

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• Limited ability to automatically detect issues and provide remedial solutions, pushing engineering teams to conduct troubleshooting
• Limited monitoring features and implementation processes require a workaround

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Ideal for companies with custom integration requirements and those that want to achieve automation through text. 

Cyclr

Another solution solely limited to the embedded iPaaS space, Cyclr facilitates low-code integration workflows for customer-facing integrations. 

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Benefits of Cyclr

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• Enables companies to use seamlessly design a new workflow with templates, without heavy coding
• Provides connectors for 500+ applications and is growing
• Offers an out of the box embedded marketplace or launch functionality that allows end users to deploy integrations

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Limitations of Cyclr

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• Comes with a steep learning curve 
• Limited built-in workflow actions for each connector, where complex integrations might require additional endpoints, the feasibility for which is limited
• Lack of visibility into the system sending API requests, making monitoring and debugging issues a challenge

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Ideal for companies looking for centralized integration management within a standardized integration ecosystem. 

Unified API

The next approach to powering customer-facing integrations is leveraging a unified API. As an aggregated API, unified API platforms help companies easily integrate with several applications within a category (CRM, ATS, HRIS) using a single connector. Leveraging unified API, companies can seamlessly integrate both vertically and horizontally at scale. 

Merge

As a unified API, Merge enables users to add hundreds of integrations via a single connector, simplifying customer-facing integrations. 

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Benefits of Merge

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• High coverage within the integrations categories; 7+ integration categories currently available
• Integration observability features with fully searchable logs, dashboard and automated issue detection 
• Access to custom objects and fields like field mapping, authenticated passthrough requests

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Limitations of Merge

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• Limited flexibility for frontend auth component and limited customization capabilities
• Requires maintaining a polling infrastructure for managing data syncs
• Webhooks based data sync doesn’t guarantee scale and data delivery

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Ideal to build multiple integrations together with out-of-the-box features for managing integrations.

Finch

A leader in the unified API space for employment systems, Finch helps build 1:many integrations with HRIS and payroll applications. 

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Benefits of Finch

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• One of the highest number of integrations available in the HRIS and Payroll integration categories
• Facilitates standardized data for all employment data across top HRIS and Payroll providers, like Quickbooks, ADP, and Paycom
• Allows users to read and write benefits data, including payroll deductions and contributions programmatically

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Limitations of Finch

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• Limited number of integration categories available
• Offers  “assisted” integrations, requiring a Finch team member or associate to manually sync data on your behalf
• Low data fields support limited data fields available in the source system

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Ideal for companies looking to build integrations with employment systems and high levels of data standardization. 

Apideck

Another option in the unified API category is Apideck, which offers integrations in more categories than the above two mentioned SaaS integration platforms in this space. 

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Benefits of Apideck

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• Higher number of categories (inc. Accounting, CRM, File Storage, HRIS, ATS, Ecommerce, Issue Tracking, POS, SMS) than many other alternatives and is quick to add new integrations
• Popular for its integration marketplace, known as Apideck ecosystem
• Offers best in class onboarding experience and responsive customer support

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Limitations of Apideck

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• Limited number of live integrations within each category
• Limited data sync capabilities; inability to access data beyond its own data fields

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Ideal for companies looking for a wider range of integration categories with an openness to add new integrations to its suite. 

Knit

A unified API, Knit facilitates integrations with multiple categories with a single connector for each category; an exponentially growing category base, richer than other alternatives.

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Benefits of Knit

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• Seamless data normalization and transformation at 10x speed with custom data fields for non-standard data models
• The only SaaS integration platform which doesn’t store a copy of the end customer’s data, ensuring superior privacy and security (as all requests are pass through in nature)
• 100% events-driven webhook architecture, which ensures data sync in real time, without the need to pull data periodically (no polling architecture needed)
• Guaranteed scalability and delivery, irrespective of the data load, offering a 99.99% SLA
• Custom data models, sync frequency and auth component for greater flexibility
• Offers RCA and resolution to identify and fix integration issues before a customer can report it
• Ensures complete visibility into the integration activity, including the ability to identify which records were synced, ability to rerun syncs etc. 

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Ideal for companies looking for SaaS integration platforms with wide horizontal and vertical coverage, complete data privacy and don’t wish to maintain a polling infrastructure, while ensuring sync scalability and delivery. 

Best SaaS integration platforms: A comparative analysis

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TL:DR

Clearly SaaS integrations are the building blocks to connect and ensure seamless flow of data between applications. However, the route that organizations decide to take large depends on their use cases. While workflow automation or iPaaS makes sense for internal use integrations, an embedded iPaaS or a unified API approach will serve the purpose of building customer facing integrations. Within each approach, there are several alternatives available to choose from. While making a choice, organizations must consider:

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• The breadth (horizontal coverage/ categories) and depth (integrations within each category) that are available
• Security, authentication and authorization mechanisms
• Integration maintenance and management support
• Visibility into the integration activity along with intuitive issue detection and resolution
• The way data syncs work (events based or do they require an additional polling infrastructure)

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Depending on what you consider to be more valuable for your organization, you can go in for the right approach and the right option from within the 14 best SaaS integration platforms shared above. 

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SaaS (software-as-a-service) applications make up 70% of total company software use and by 2025, 85% of the business applications will be SaaS based. Furthermore, the average number of SaaS applications used by a company reached as high as 370+ in 2023. Naturally, the investments in SaaS application procurement and deployment is on an exponential rise. However, to maximize their return on investment in SaaS applications, businesses are focusing cloud software integration to facilitate seamless exchange of data. While initially, the focus was on end users driving integrations, in the current scenario, the onus has largely shifted, where SaaS providers are expected to offer integrations for scalable adoption. 

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Essentially, in SaaS integrations, SaaS applications are connected with one another via their API (application programming interface) i.e. API integration to facilitate data exchange, build workflows and automate repetitive tasks. As the number of SaaS applications used by a company grows, integrations become more of a necessity than just a competitive advantage. In fact, the SaaS integration market is projected to grow from $4.4 billion in 2020 to $11.4 billion by 2025, clearly illustrating the growing importance of integrations in today’s market landscape. 

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While seamless data exchange between applications to ensure different apps are able to work together efficiently is a clear rationale behind SaaS integrations, other factors play a pivotal role in the SaaS integration rise movement. A boost in efficiency and accuracy due to reduced manual data entry, data-driven decision making and even a better employee experience are some key business benefits of SaaS integrations. 

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However, building and managing SaaS integrations poses significant challenges for businesses. Right from compatibility and data normalization challenges between different applications to security and privacy risks, especially when it comes to exchange of sensitive and confidential data. Furthermore, lack of robust API documentation and the overall increasing demand for integrations ends up making software connectivity a nightmare for developers. 

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Invariably, the increasing need for SaaS integrations coupled with the challenges companies face in building and maintaining them has given rise to the adoption of third party SaaS integration platforms. 

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In this article, we will give a detailed overview of the SaaS integration landscape, focusing on:

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• What are SaaS integrations
• Business case for SaaS integrations along with use cases
• Challenges in building and maintaining SaaS integrations
• Different strategies to power SaaS integrations and the best practices
• Future of cloud software integration 

Decoding SaaS integrations 

SaaS integrations follow the process of connecting a SaaS application to either another SaaS application or some in-premise software. The underlying objective is to enable flow of data from one application or software to the other, while automating workflows across the different platforms in use leveraging the API. In simple terms, the API facilitates communication between two applications, enabling them to request and send data and information to one another, fostering data integration. Generally, SaaS integrations are either: 

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• Internal integrations, where companies connect applications they use internally with one another to ensure smooth operations. For instance, when companies connect their HRMS platform with Payroll software to ensure all employee data regarding leaves, new hires, is synced with the payroll system to facilitate accurate compensation disbursement. 

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• Customer facing integrations, where companies offer integrations between their SaaS product and other SaaS applications that a customer might use to facilitate greater adoption and enhance customer delight. For instance, an ATS platform integrating with the customer’s HRMS platform to ensure details of all new hires are updated automatically once the candidate is onboarded 

SaaS integrations essentially serve the purpose of facilitating data flow between two applications. Whether it is for internal or external use, businesses need to narrow down on the approach or type of integration process they will follow. Depending on the needs and scope, businesses can adopt one of the following types of integrations:

• Native integrations: These integrations are built directly between two applications, and the onus generally lies on one or both of the applications to build and maintain these integrations. Thus, native integrations require in-house resources and engineering bandwidth to build, manage and sustain data integration. Native integrations prevent the additional coordination with any third party vendor and gives businesses complete control over their integration process. However, they can be difficult to scale, considering they need to be built and maintained 1:1. At the same time, it may lead to resource inefficiency for your engineering resources.  
• Third party integrations: Unlike native integrations, third party integrations rely on external or third party platforms also known as integration platforms to help businesses build and manage SaaS integrations, leveraging APIs. Like native integrations, they can be used for internal and customer-facing requirements. As largely an outsourced process, third party integrations facilitate easier scalability, saves developer bandwidth and accelerates the time to market (especially for customer-facing integrations). On the flip side, these integration platforms give businesses limited visibility into integration performance and come with the risk of relying on a 3rd party vendor.  
• Custom integrations: Lastly, there are custom integrations, which are essentially tailored to the needs and requirements of a single customer. They are not necessarily an approach to building and managing integrations, but a specific type which are exclusive to a client and not meant for deployment at a mass scale. 

Whether you go for native integration or third party integrations, the route is generally via APIs or application programming interface. An API is specifically a single or a collection of endpoints for an application, with each endpoint enabling users to access data or functionality for that application. It enables applications to talk to each other by extracting and sharing data between them. Research shows that 90% of developers use API and they play a significant role in SaaS integration. APIs facilitate data integration by enabling software interoperability between different applications. Additionally, most APIs come with robust documentation which allows developers to build integrations with the applications they use for data exchange, workflow automation, while ensuring authentication and encryption. 

The business benefits of SaaS integrations

There are several reasons businesses invest in SaaS integrations, here are the top few:

Benefits of internal SaaS integrations 

By integrating SaaS applications used internally, businesses can:

Boost efficiency, productivity and accuracy

SaaS integrations effectively eliminate or significantly reduce data silos between different teams and departments, facilitating the seamless flow of relevant information and enhancing workplace efficiency. By automating data entry, these integrations not only save valuable human time but also minimize errors that could lead to financial and reputational damage. For example, manual data entry errors—such as incorrect compensation values when transferring information from HRMS to payroll—can result in overpaying or underpaying employees. Consequently, SaaS integrations improve accuracy and productivity, allowing teams to concentrate on value-added work.

Get effective customer insights

When businesses integrate various applications that interact with their customers, they gain a more comprehensive understanding of customer expectations. For instance, integrating CRM and marketing platforms can provide insights into customer personas, preferences, and behaviors, enabling businesses to create more targeted campaigns. If a customer responds to a particular type of campaign, sales representatives can use this information to tailor their pitches and reach out to the customer during their engagement with the campaign. However, this level of insight is only achievable when these SaaS applications communicate with each other in real time, thereby illustrating the need for SaaS integrations. 

Automate repetitive tasks

SaaS integrations enable businesses to automate various routine and repetitive tasks, ensuring they are completed efficiently and without human intervention or delay. For example, when a customer's status changes in the marketing automation platform, it is automatically updated in the CRM, alerting sales representatives to activate the customer. Similarly, integrating CRM with ERP systems can automate invoice generation, ensuring accuracy and consistency each month. This automation via SaaS integrations leads to higher reliability and precision in execution of repetitive tasks. 

Improve employee experience

SaaS integrations for internal applications greatly enhance the employee experience in several ways. First, they significantly reduce employees' dependence on one another for information, streamlining workflows and improving efficiency. Second, by automating data entry tasks, employees can focus on more engaging and intellectually stimulating activities that align with their interests. Overall, these integrations lead to higher employee engagement and satisfaction.  

Benefits of customer-facing SaaS integrations

Building customer facing SaaS integrations also has specific benefits to SaaS providers, enabling them to:

Expand market reach

SaaS integrations provide companies with a clear competitive edge over providers that lack this functionality. When a SaaS provider offers more integrations compared to its competitors, customers are more likely to choose their service. This capability also opens up new markets and customer segments that require integrations with their core products.

Retain more customers

Integrations play a crucial role in customer retention for SaaS businesses. When customers can easily use your application alongside their other tools, they experience greater business benefits, leading to higher satisfaction and reduced churn. Additionally, once customers start using your integrations, they are less likely to switch to competitors or develop native integrations, resulting in increased customer stickiness.

Receive more customer insights

Offering integration support with other applications provides access to valuable insights about customers and their preferences. This data helps you better understand your customers and personalize your engagement strategies, ultimately delivering a smoother and more tailored user experience.

Unlock upselling/ new revenue opportunities

Offering customer-facing integrations can also open up new opportunities for upselling and additional revenue generation. While some integration can be given as free, others can be offered for a premium or at a small cost, enabling you to monetize SaaS integrations. You can eventually explore which features customers engage with more, to add them as core functionalities for your product as well. Furthermore, if you have integrations with applications that need in-app purchases or payments that you can route through your app, creating another revenue opportunity. Facilitating sales for any integrated application/ software, makes you eligible for commissions.

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Related: Importance of SaaS Integration: Why Do You Need Them?

Popular SaaS Integration Use Cases

While we have discussed the overall business benefits of SaaS integrations, let us have a quick look at some specific use cases. This section will focus on how integrating one type of applications with the other results in business impact. 

Sync HRMS and payroll data for accurate compensation

Data integration between HRMS and payroll applications is beneficial when it comes to employee compensation. This ensures that as soon as any employee is onboarded on HRMS, their compensation and related details are automatically added to the payroll system. At the same time, relevant information needed for creating the payroll like attendance, paid/ unpaid leave, bonus, etc. captured in HRMS is directly updated on the payroll system. 

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Such integration between HRMS and payroll ensures every employee is compensated as per the due, without any delays or inaccuracies. At the same time, once the pay run is over, the details of compensation disbursed are updated in HRMS to maintain all employee records in one place. 

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Related: Everything you need to know about HRIS API Integration

Add employee information from ATS to onboarding systems

Onboarding systems generally require all critical employee information to ensure smooth induction. Connecting the ATS and onboarding system can ensure that all relevant employee information (like email address, phone number, physical address, etc.) is transferred to the onboarding system in real time. 

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This ensures that as soon as a selected candidate signs the offer letter and becomes an employee, he/she receives all the onboarding documents. In addition, any other onboarding incentives or gifts are also delivered in a timely manner. Once the integration is established, every time a candidate is marked as hired in ATS, the details are automatically sent to the onboarding system and a new profile is created in real time.  

Sync lead data between marketing platforms and CRM

A classic SaaS integration use case is connecting marketing automation platforms with the CRM. Generally, both the sales and marketing team work towards nurturing leads for closure. Connecting marketing automation platforms like Hubspot/ Mailchimp with CRM (sales) like Salesforce can ensure that whenever a new lead is created post engagement with some campaign, the same is reflected in the CRM for sales reps to nurture and pursue the same for closure. SImilarly, if there is any change in the status of the lead at any end, updating the status in the other platform helps personalize the messaging as per the lead’s new position in the sales funnel. 

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Therefore, integrating these SaaS applications ensures that any change or addition in either platform is immediately reflected in the other to ensure real time action and faster sales closure. 

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Related: CRM API integration: All you need to know

Connect CRM and contract management system for customer onboarding

Next, connecting CRM to contract management systems and the storage applications used by an organization ensures seamless customer onboarding and documentation. Whenever a prospect’s status is changed to customer in CRM, integration with the contract management system can ensure that a standard contract and paperwork is automatically disbursed.

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Similarly, when any customer documents are uploaded in the CRM, an integration with file storage applications (like DropBox) can ensure that a repository of all files are created in the latter. While the CRM might have restricted access, the file storage system can be centralized providing necessary access to files to all those who need it. A bi-directional sync can also help ensure that all files and related changes are reflected in both the CRM and file storage system. 

Sync HRMS and payroll data for benefits administration

Many companies now use benefits administration software to manage the benefits, incentives, etc. they offer to their employees. Syncing HRMS and payroll data with such benefits software can help streamline the process exponentially. For instance, if the organization recognizes the employees on their work anniversary, data sync from HRMS can help facilitate gift-giving/ recognition. At the same time, whenever any data is updated in HRMS or payroll, integration ensures that it is reflected in the benefits administration platform (promotions, increase in salary, attendance), which may have an impact on the incentives and benefits an employee receives. 

Choosing the Right SaaS Integration Strategy

Once you are convinced that integrations are critical for your business, it is time to decide on how you want to navigate the SaaS integration strategy and process. Irrespective of whether a SaaS provider is leveraging integrations for internal software connectivity or building customer-facing integrations, there are largely two options to choose from i.e. Build vs Buy. 

Building native integrations in-house

As an integration strategy, building integrations requires in-house developers and engineers to develop point-to-point connections with API of software you wish to integrate with. As a 1:1 process, the integrations feel like an extension of your own application, thereby offering a native experience. 

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Building integrations in-house is ideal when you:

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• Only have a few applications to integrate with (internally or customer facing)
• Wish to retain end to end control of the integration 
• Need to customize multiple functionalities
• Have to build integrations which are very simple, with publicly available APIs
• Have integrations that impact your core offering, requiring complete code control
• Have relevant domain expertise, developer bandwidth and longer turnaround time

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However, as the need to scale integrations arose, businesses started facing challenges. In fact, research shows that:

• 70% of digital transformation projects fail due to lack of integration quality
• 45% digital leaders believe poor integration is the second main barrier to the effective application of digital technology
• $250,000 to $500,000 is the average cost to a business due to poor integrations 

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These obstacles can be largely attributed to a series of factors, including:

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• Speed of scalability: Any integration can take between 2 weeks to even three months to build. Since building integrations in-house is a 1:1 affair, the feasibility comes under pressure when developers need to build 100s of integrations together. The speed of building integrations is seldom able to keep pace with the volume of demand for new integrations, making scalability a challenge. 

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• High cost of integration development: Taking into account the time and effort of developers, quality analysts and product managers involved in building integrations, the average cost of one integration stands at ~$10K. While this is the direct cost, loss of productivity from the core offering adds intangible expenses to the process. 

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• Limited API access and poor documentation: SaaS integrations require access to APIs of applications to connect with. However, APIs for all applications may not be available free of cost. Even for those where APIs are available, frequently, the API documentation is poorly written, difficult to understand and largely inadequate. This further increases the time developers have to spend on building integrations (sometimes the integrations don’t get built at all, despite all efforts).

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• Maintenance and management: In case an integration malfunctions, the process of identifying the issue, determining the course of remediation and actually performing those actions is often complex and time consuming. This can lead to inconveniences and a poor experience for internal users or end customers. 

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• Steep learning curve: Building integrations in-house often requires domain expertise for each integration you are working on. This is required when creating data models for normalization, mapping, etc. Without this knowledge, which often comes with a steep learning curve, building integrations can be difficult.   

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• Resource constraints: As mentioned, building and maintaining integrations in-house requires significant allocation of developer resources. And, this is not even a one-time requirement. The demand for integrations is largely never ending and, hence, businesses need consistent resource allocation for integrations, which can be a challenge as often the resources are limited and even if available, developers do not enjoy working on integrations, often leading to poor experience and work dissatisfaction. 

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• Data normalization, authentication and authorization: In-house integrations put the onus of managing data normalization as well as authentication on SaaS providers. On the one hand, data normalization becomes daunting as applications within the same category (e.g. HRMS) have different data models and syntax for the same field. On the other hand, each application might have a distinct authentication route, requiring developers to maintain different access tokens and manage their authentication. 

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Related: Build vs Buy: The Best Approach to SaaS Integrations

Buying or outsourcing to third party integration platforms

As the need for SaaS integrations grew at an exponential pace, SaaS providers found building and managing integrations in-house complex and overwhelming. Thus the strategy of buying or outsourcing integrations to third party integration platforms gained momentum. Put simply, integration platforms have pre-built connectors with SaaS applications which they offer to SaaS providers, for both internal integrations, as well as to create customer facing integrations. 

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Buying or outsourcing integrations is ideal when you:

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• Want to build multiple integrations in a short span of time
• Have limited engineering bandwidth and core product priorities/ want your developers to focus on your core product
• Want to optimize resource and monetary spend on integrations
• Have limited domain expertise to add different categories of integrations
• Don’t want to carry the burden of managing and maintaining integrations 
• Wish to outsource the tedious tasks of data normalization, authentication and authorization
• Don’t have access to well developed API documentation

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Overall, building integrations in-house can be cost intensive and complicated and ideal for a small number of simple integrations, whereas, buying or outsourcing integrations is resource-lite and a scalable model. 

Top SaaS integration platforms to buy integrations

Within the buying or outsourcing model of integrations, there are several types of SaaS integrations you can choose from, depending on your requirements and scope. 

Integration platforms for internal integrations

iPaas (integration platform as a service) or workflow automation is an ideal choice when looking for integration platforms for internal software connectivity. They come with pre-built connectors that you can directly use to integrate two or more applications within your software suite. Additionally, also offer SDKs which allow SaaS providers to custom develop any integrations or functionalities, if needed. 

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One of the biggest benefits of iPaaS is that they offer low-code or no-code solutions to build automated workflows between the applications in use. This enables diverse teams to leverage the tool, without the need to engage developers at every step. Such a solution reduces the reliance on manual data export and import or the dependence on in-house engineering team to build API integrations. Team members don’t really need to understand how APIs work to leverage iPaaS for integrations. 

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iPaaS enables SaaS providers to:

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• Accelerate the pace of integration development for internal use
• Empower their non-technical team members to build and manage integrations
• Reduce the dependency on engineering teams and democratizing access 
• Leverage the drag and drop integration functionalities, allowing them to visualize how the integration works 

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Some of the top players in the iPaaS market today are:

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• Workato: Provides enterprise grade workflow automation with a high number of pre-built connectors, however, is considered expensive for smaller organizations and comes with limited offline functionality. 

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• Zapier: Comes with 7000+ pre-built connectors and its no-code UI allows non technical teams to automate tasks, however, the use cases are rather simple and may not be able to support very complex integrations. 

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• Mulesoft: Ideal for integration with Salesforce and Salesforce products along with API management, but requires more technical expertise than other players in the market. 

Integration platforms for customer-facing integrations

While for a long time, internal integrations were the norm, where end customers built integrations for the applications they used, gradually, the customer sentiment changed. Increasingly, now customers expect SaaS providers to offer integrations which are embedded within their product, shifting the onus on the latter for building and managing integrations. As the number of applications that customers use showed an increase, managing the entire process in-house became daunting. At the same time, complexity of integrations also increased, where customers wanted more functionalities, than simple workflow automation. Hence, SaaS providers were expected to offer out of the box integrations which are customer facing. 

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Essentially, embedded or customer facing integrations enable SaaS providers to easily connect their software with other applications that their customers are using. For instance, an ATS provider may provide embedded integrations to connect with the HRMS used by the customer. This integration will help the ATS provider to automatically update all relevant information to the customer’s HRMS as soon as a candidate is onboarded for all HR processes to be conducted. With embedded integrations, SaaS providers can:

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• Automate the data flow between their application and the other tools used by the end customer
• Quickly connect with different customer applications, leading to exemplary customer experience
• Build integrations with customer applications without the need to write heavy codes for each integration
• Provide an almost native integration and cohesive brand experience

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Within the embedded integration space, there are two routes that SaaS providers can explore, including:

Embedded iPaaS

As the name suggests, this is an embedded version of the iPaaS solution. While iPaaS is meant for internal integrations, this tool is embedded within the SaaS provider’s application, facilitating workflow automation with customer’s other applications. Embedded iPaaS allows SaaS providers to either implement integrations for their customers or enable customers to implement the integrations they want within the SaaS product offered. A combination of both these alternatives can also be leveraged. 

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Embedded iPaaS offers a varied set of pre-built connectors that SaaS providers can use to build integrations and embed them within your product. It allows you to manage authentication, normalization, etc. for your end users. While embedded iPaaS providers offer a wide range of out of the box connectors, some also allow developers to custom build connectors in case their use case is not covered. At the same time, an embedded iPaaS is built on a serverless architecture, which allows developers to focus entirely on integration logic, without diverting attention to infrastructure management. Some embedded iPaaS solutions include:

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• Workato embedded: Comes with a pre-built integration library of 1200+ connectors, along with enterprise grade security and compliance, but lacks a standard data model.

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• Paragone: Provides complete access to underlying API, with robust monitoring features and supports on-premise deployment, but comes with a limited number of pre-built connectors. 

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• Pandium: Offers an embedded integration marketplace, allowing customers to find all integrations together, but with a limited catalog of connectors. 

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• Tray embedded: Provides a large number of connectors, with the option to add more connectors on request along with API management functionality, but offers limited capability to automatically detect and remedy integration issues. 

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While an embedded iPaaS definitely easies the process of building and managing customer facing integrations, it generally requires a high level of technical expertise to use and master. Furthermore, within embedded iPaaS, integrations need to be built on a 1:1 model, i.e. one integration at a time and gives limited visibility into the integration performance. Also, not all embedded iPaaS tools offer complete white-labeling, disrupting a consistent and uniform user experience. 

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Related: 14 Best SaaS Integration Platforms

Unified API

Addressing some of the challenges of embedded iPaaS for building and managing customer-facing integrations, unified APIs have come to the forefront. A unified API can be considered as an aggregator of APIs that enables developers to integrate with multiple applications within a category by a single time effort. Essentially, it accelerates the integration process by moving from a 1:1 to 1:many approach. Here are some of the reasons why businesses are moving towards unified APIs from embedded iPaaS:

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• Gives an opportunity to SaaS providers to offer both depth (integrations within a category) and width (more number of categories) at an accelerated pace with a universal API which can connect all APIs within that category.

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• Provides a centralized dashboard to monitor the health of all integrations from a single pane of glass, ensuring that most integration issues are detected automatically with the functionality to initiate remedial action. 

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• Superior customer experience, enabling end customers to leverage integrations seamlessly without the need for excessive technical intervention and expertise. 

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• Relieves engineering bandwidth as developers only have to understand documentation and connect with a single API for one category, ensuring resource optimization, while facilitating rapid deployment.

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• Facilitates bulk data transfer, data sync in multiple rows with smart rate limit management.

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• Some unified APIs like Knit also support a unified data model to facilitate high speed data normalization, but also have room for custom data models for fields that remain outside the standard ones. 

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Related: Whitepaper: The Unified API Approach to Building Product Integrations

Some of the top unified API providers include:

• Knit: Ensures robust horizontal and vertical coverage in integrations and uses a webhooks based architecture, ensuring real time data sync without the need to maintain any infrastructure. Guarantees scalability and delivery, irrespective of the data load, offering a 99.99% SLA. It is the only unified API which doesn’t store a copy of customer data as all the requests are pass through in nature. 
• Finch: Provides one of the highest number of integrations in the HRMS and payroll space with standardized data for all employment data, however, the categories supported are limited and maintains assisted integrations, which requires an external involvement for data sync.
• Merge: Offers integration in 7+ SaaS categories with fully searchable logs, dashboard and automated issue detection, however, it requires businesses to maintain a polling infrastructure and its webhook based data sync doesn’t guarantee scale and data delivery.

As the market sentiment is driving greater adoption of unified APIs for integration building and management, businesses often face the question of how they can choose the best unified API platform for their needs. Here is a quick break down of the factors you should consider while finalizing the unified API partner you wish to go with:

• API and application coverage: On the one hand, you need to check the horizontal and vertical coverage of integration and categories supported by the unified API. Choose a unified API which offers integration not only with applications you want to connect with right now, but also those you can anticipate coming as a need from customers in the future. On the other hand, you must evaluate how many API endpoints the unified API covers. It is important that your unified API covers REST, SOAP, GraphQL, to facilitate maximum coverage. 
• Security and authentication: Understand the authentication and encryption used by the unified API. Preferably choose a partner which not only complies with all industry standards, but also facilitates encryption in transit as well as at rest. Factors like least privilege, etc. should also be considered. Finally, consider platforms which do not store a copy of the customer data for maximum privacy. 
• Data sync model: Check whether the unified API requires you to maintain an additional polling infrastructure or relies on a webhook based architecture. The latter one is preferable as it facilitates real time sync. But, even in the case of the latter, check the scalability and delivery guarantee with increasing data load, opting for platforms that offer 99.99% SLA. 
• Integration maintenance: You also need to ensure that the unified API provides you with detailed Logs, Issues, Integrated Accounts and Syncs page and supports you to keep track of every API calls, data syncs and requests. 

Related: What Should You Look For in A Unified API Platform?

Best Practices for Successful SaaS Integrations

Here are some of the best practices to keep in mind to unlock SaaS integration success:

Start with a Clear Goal and Integration Priorities

When you decide to add integrations, you need to have clarity on the purpose and the objectives that you seek to achieve. Do you want to automate internal workflows to save your team from unnecessary data entry work and ensure accuracy, or do you want to offer customer facing integrations for better product appeal or is it a combination of the two, or some other goal entirely. Having a clear goal will help you better understand which approach or integration strategy to go with. 

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At the same time, you need to prioritize and differentiate between integrations that are a must have, good to have, may be needed in the future, not relevant. Simply because you are getting an integration as a part of a package may not necessarily be the reason to go for it. Each integration is likely to serve a different purpose with varying degree of impact on the time savings, customer acquisition, retention, etc. Therefore, it is important to understand the value that each integration will bring to the table vis-a-vis the resources or inputs needed to achieve the same. Prioritize integrations which facilitate a high return on investment and are business critical in the beginning. 

Choose the Ideal Approach

Once you have a clear goal and integration priorities set, choosing the ideal integration approach will be a cakewalk. For instance:

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• If you only have to build a one-off integration and wish to retain complete control, build the integration in-house.
• If you want to build a suite of integrations to facilitate software connectivity between the applications you use internally, go for an iPaaS solution. 

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• If you want pre-built connectors to offer customer-facing integrations, but have the time and resources to build them 1:1, embedded iPaaS is a good option. 

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• If you want to scale customer facing integrations quickly and connect with a single API to integrate with almost all applications within a category, choose a unified API. 

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Your choice of the right integration approach will largely depend on the (illustrative):

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• Number of integrations you wish to build
• Primary goal or type of integration needed
• Time you have before you want to deploy the integrations
• Complexity and available API support for each integration
• Availability of in-house resources and expertise to build and manage integrations

Prioritize Security and Authentication

Since integration is primarily built on the foundation of data exchange, it is extremely important to prioritize security, privacy via robust authentication and authorization. On the one hand, it is extremely important to ensure compliance with the standard norms and guidelines like SOC2, GDPR, and ISO27001 when it comes to data privacy. 

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However, to ensure SaaS integration success, SaaS providers need to go a step beyond to ensure encryption of data, both in transit and at rest. In addition, securing all PII and user credentials should also be secured in an additional application security layer.  Furthermore, if you choose to go with a third-party integration platform, delve deep into their rate limiting practices, assess authentication and authorization protocols, and review incident response plans. Also, check how they access or use the data that flows through them (ideally, the integration platform should not store a copy of customer data). 

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Related: API Security 101: Best Practices, How-to Guides, Checklist, FAQs

Test Thoroughly

A seamless integration experience is what defines success. Any major issue or bug can lead to reputational and monetary damages, both for internal and customer-facing integrations. In fact, in the latter, it can initiate customer churn and make new customer acquisition extremely difficult. Therefore, thorough and robust testing is critical. In fact, API testing, especially in a simulated environment, can help proactively detect and determine remediation actions for potential problems. You should test for:

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• Scalability of data to ensure that your integration is able to guarantee scalability and data delivery irrespective of the data load, consistently. 

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• Volume of requests, facilitating integration and data exchange smoothly when processing a high number of requests.

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• Version and backward compatibility to ensure compliance with different versions of the third party API as well as ascertaining that any modifications in the third party API do not disrupt any other ongoing functionality. 

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• Error handling to get a real world experience of how if an error occurs, it will be identified and remediated and whether or not it meets the expectations set, i.e. the ability to handle errors without the system crashing.

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• Security, compliance, authorization and encryption to ensure all security protocols are implemented effectively and will prevent any security breach from happening. 

Document the Process

Irrespective of whether you build or buy integrations, ensure that each step of the process is documented effectively. At the same time, ensure engaging more than one developer in the integration process to expand the knowledge base within the team. These two practices will ensure that even in a situation of employee turnover, there is no gap or challenge. Additionally, in case there is a resource gap, this practice will help ensure even a new developer is able to pick up the integration development or management tasks. 

Monitor and Maintain

Lastly, it is extremely important to monitor the health of your integrations via detailed logs, issues, etc. on a regular basis. This can help you determine any potential threat proactively to address the same. Furthermore, it is important to reevaluate integration goals and priorities at regular intervals and the expectations and requirements might change, which are likely to demand a change in the approach and other factors as well. 

The Future of SaaS Integrations: Trends Shaping the Landscape

The landscape of SaaS integrations has undergone a complete transformation since inception. While initially designed for internal simple use cases, SaaS providers today require complex customer-facing integrations. And, this is just the beginning. Technological disruptions and changing market sentiments will constantly redefine SaaS integrations. Some of the trends for the foreseeable future of SaaS integrations include:

AI-Powered Integrations

Automation and AI will make integrations smarter. While till now integrations have been automating workflows and data exchange between applications, the rise of Generative AI is likely to unleash smarter, faster and more efficient integration processes. Currently, integration deployment still requires developer intervention and can take up to a few days to deploy. However, with AI, integrations may enter an auto-pilot phase automating the entire integration process, accelerating it exponentially. At the same time, with increased adoption of NLP in integrations, the process is likely to become more intuitive. 

Focus on Vertical SaaS Integrations

The near future (and in some cases, the near past) is likely to see a focus on industry-specific integrations. While each application has a specific domain, we will increasingly witness integration solutions which are specifically tailored for an industry, taking into account the data requirements, syntax and models, and sync frequency that the industry needs. In fact, integration providers may even offer out of the box industry specific solutions. 

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For instance, when it comes to customer facing integrations, a CRM provider working exclusively with the healthcare industry might be offered with vertical coverage of integration with billing, inventory, etc. applications, while those working with the manufacturing industry might have different needs.  

Increased Focus on Security and Compliance

A trend that is likely to continue all over to the future will be a focus on security and compliance. While security is already a predominant factor impacting integration decisions, however, as data privacy regulations become more stringent and attacks become more sophisticated, the focus on zero-trust architecture, the option to completely eliminate the need to store data copies, etc. will gain more momentum. 

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The future is likely to make integrations more accessible for a higher number of SaaS providers, enabling it to play a pivotal role in business growth, especially by leveraging AI, industry specialization and heightened security. 

TL:DR

The SaaS integration landscape will continue to evolve and disrupt software interoperability, enhancing the utility and connectivity between different applications for SaaS providers and their end customers. By facilitating seamless data exchange and workflow automation, SaaS integrations lead to increased productivity, reduced human errors, better employee and customer experience, and overall, positively impact the bottom line for any business. 

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While the need for integrations is well accepted, SaaS providers often find themselves confused between the best way to achieve their integration goals. Some prefer maintaining complete control and build and manage all integrations in-house. However, this process lacks the scope for scale. Thus, many are now moving towards leveraging third party integration platforms, including iPaaS, embedded iPaaS and unified API. Each of these alternatives is suited for different requirements (internal vs customer-facing integrations) and requires varying degrees of developer resources to accomplish the integration process. 

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For those looking to scale customer facing integrations quickly, unified APIs have come up as a credible solution. With a single API for all integrations within a category, the time to market with unified APIs is exceptionally quick and some of the top solutions ensure that SaaS providers don’t have to maintain any polling infrastructure for data sync, while ascertaining the highest security standards. 

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Overall, it is important for SaaS providers to prioritize their integration requirements and focus on security, testing, documentation and monitoring consistently to ensure a seamless integration experience. As technology and market disruption impact the SaaS space, AI and automation are likely to streamline integrations further, leading to higher efficiency, productivity and business outcomes.

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Any business today will have multiple requirements to facilitate a pleasant customer experience. Since not all functionalities can be developed in house, because of limited resources and bandwidth, most businesses are turning to third-party solutions. To ensure smooth communication and exchange of data between, integrations have been the go-to solution for all developers and technology leaders. The rise of integrations led to the rise of iPaaS or Integration Platform as a Service. 

What is iPaaS?

For simple understanding, Integration Platform as a Service or iPaaS refers to a platform which makes it easy for businesses to connect different applications and processes. iPaaS enables developers to connect applications, replicate and exchange data and ensure all other integration initiatives are carried out easily. iPaaS allows users to build and deploy workflows on the cloud, without installing any software or hardware. It helps you to benefit from integrations, but at a significantly lower cost and effort. 

What is an embedded iPaaS? 

As a developer, there are two types of integrations that you will come across during the development cycle. From an end user perspective, you will add certain integrations that your customers will ultimately use, connecting them with your product. The iPaaS that you will use to streamline and connect these integrations is called embedded iPaaS. With embedded iPaaS, you can build and manage integrations that easily connect with your product and offer additional functionalities to your customers.

Embedded iPaaS helps SaaS businesses provide multiple integrations or connected third party applications to their customers. In general, a business at any point uses 100+ applications, most of which are SaaS apps. However, unless these applications interact with one another, exchange data, generate insights and ensure workflow automation based on data exchange, they don’t make business value. Thus, embedded iPaaS seeks to ensure smooth connection and communication between your product and other applications that your customers are using. 

Using embedded iPaaS significantly frees developers of the additional burden of building integrations and other functionalities in house and can be very coding intensive at times. 

Embedded iPaaS comes with:

• Support to manage authentication for the end user
• Pre built stable connectors for common SaaS apps with logic components for no code integration building which can manage high volumes of data
• Customer connectors with which you can build integrations specific to your business or product
• Ability to management alignment and syncing between different moving parts
• Infrastructure to run your integrations
• A pleasant and user friendly UX for your customers to experience integrations 

Embedded vs. traditional iPaaS

As mentioned above, as a developer, you will come across integrations of two types. First, there will be integrations that you will use internally to create the right solution and functionalities for your product. Traditional iPaaS is the platform that helps you integrate the apps that you use internally to facilitate workflow automation, ensure data integration, etc. By logic, even your end customers can deploy traditional iPaaS to connect different applications. 

However, it requires the customers to build certain integrations and subscribe to an iPaaS everytime they buy a new software solution. 

To address this issue, software buyers are shifting the work of building and providing the right integration platform to SaaS business providers, giving rise to embedded iPaaS. Embedded iPaaS, thus, allows developers to build and provide native integrations for their customers, helping customers steer away from the burden of managing traditional iPaaS. Embedded iPaaS empowers SaaS developers to build integrations as a part of their product and offer them to customers as a pre-added functionality. 

Therefore, on a closer look, traditional iPaaS is best for integrations to be used internally and not ideal for end customers. Whereas, embedded iPaaS allows SaaS providers to offer native integrations pre-built into their product to the end customer as a part of their application.  

When and why to use embedded iPaaS 

Whether you are in the startup or the scale up phase of your SaaS business, there are certain indicators that will make it clear to you that you should be using embedded iPaaS. 

Some of the indicators that you need embedded iPaaS as a SaaS startup include:

• Your customers are demanding several integrations
• Your market competitors offer significantly more integrations
• You want to offer native integration experience to your users.
• Your development cycle is getting delayed 
• You/ your developers are unable to focus purely on product functionalities
• Integrations are adding significant cost to your development cycle
• You have apprehensions about building, managing and security of integrations

Even if you have crossed these basic hurdles and are in the scale up phase, you may need embedded iPaaS if:

• You are losing out on customers because of lack of integrations
• You are unable to deliver on new functions because of time taken up by integrations
• Integration management and support is eating into the developer’s time
• You are unable to manage customer experience for integrations

If you have a check mark on one or more of these points, it’s time to deploy embedded iPaaS for your SaaS application. 

Top 6 benefits of embedded iPaaS 

As a developer, you should know by now when it is the right time to deploy embedded iPaaS for your business. Put simply, it is a much faster way to build integrations for your customers without adding unnecessary pressure on your development team. Integrations can help you gain a competitive advantage and ensure that your customers don’t go looking out for better alternatives. Here are the top 6 benefits of embedded iPaaS that can help your SaaS business prosper. 

1. Reduced engineering effort

As a developer, your time and engineering effort will be best utilized in enhancing the core product features and functionalities. However, if you have to build integrations from scratch, a considerable amount of your time will be wasted. Fortunately, pre-built connectors and low-code integration designs can significantly reduce the effort and time required. 

Embedded iPaaS can help you with abstracting API and end user authentication and ensure that you are able to focus on top product priorities. As a simple use case, if you are unable to refresh your security tokens regularly, authentication of integrations will be broken for your customers, leading to a hitch in their business processes. Furthermore, it can help you create productized integrations which can be customized for different users, saving you the time to build different integrations for each user. Overall, embedded iPaaS reduces the engineering time and effort for developers spent on building integrations and workflow automation. 

2. Ability to scale/ reduced infra load

As you add more integrations to your product roadmap, the customers using them will increase and so will the volume of requests coming your way. Especially, if you are in the initial stages of your product development lifecycle, building a scalable integration infrastructure that can manage such voluminous requests will be difficult.

With embedded iPaaS, you can offload this load to the platform’s infrastructure. The right embedded iPaaS will easily be able to handle millions of requests at once, enabling you to scale your integrations while not adding the infrastructure load to your application. 

3. Accelerate time to market for integrations

With cut throat competition, the time you take to reach the market is critical when it comes to success. The more time you spend in building integrations in house, the more delay you will cause in taking your SaaS application to the market. 

With embedded iPaaS, you have the building blocks which just need to be moved around to provide the right integrations as per the customer’s expectations, in a very less time. Even when you have to introduce a new integration, you can simply activate it in the platform’s environment, without the need to spend weeks building it and then supporting ongoing maintenance. This will allow you to take your product to the market faster, leading to greater customer acquisition. 

4. Enhanced experience with native integrations

As a developer, you would understand that a pleasant UX for integrations is a must. From a technical standpoint, it is important to have native integrations. This suggests that your integrations must be accessible from within your product and shouldn’t require the customer to exit your product to check out the integration. However, building native integrations can be difficult and time consuming, considering other priorities in your development lifecycle. 

Fortunately, with embedded iPaaS, you are able to create native integrations for your product and offer them as additional functionalities than third party solutions. Furthermore, since the customer stays within your product, chances of finding alternatives become narrow. 

5. Customer integration configuration

When it comes to integrations, a developer’s role doesn’t end by defining the integration logic and building the integration. It is equally important to help the customer deploy and configure the integration and get them ready to use. It involves steps of trigger third party authorization portal as well as customer request to customize the integration. 

An embedded iPaaS can help you provide a configurable experience for your customers and allow them to customize the way they want to use the integration or how they wish the integration to interact with your product. Ensuring end-user configuration in house can be a development nightmare in the early startup/ scaleup stages, and embedded iPaaS can help address the same. 

6. Seamless maintenance and other support

Finally, to provide great experience, you need to constantly maintain and upgrade your integrations. This comes with additional costs and developer hours. Like any other product feature, integrations need constant iterations and developer interventions to debug any challenges. 

Maintenance includes updating API references, updating integrations when you or the third party release a new version, debugging, etc. However, using embedded iPaaS comes with pre-built connectors that take care of maintenance of API references. It will even take care of updating events, triggering workflows. Thus, as a part of the engineering team, the bandwidth needed to reflect on integration updates will be significantly reduced. 

Be it iterating on third party integrations or accommodating updates to your product to sync with integrations, embedded iPaaS becomes responsible for a great portion of integration maintenance. Furthermore, when you face bugs in an integration, it is often more difficult to solve or debug the problem as you may not be well versed with the technicalities and codebase. However, embedded iPaaS often have a history of integration and can make it very easy for you to identify error root cause with log streaming capabilities. 

TL DR: iPaaS for SaaS today

In conclusion, it is evident the embedded iPaaS can help you accelerate and scale your integration journey and place you ahead in the development roadmap. As a quick recap, here’s why you should go for embedded iPaaS:

• Build native integrations
• Reduce maintenance effort
• Accelerate time to market
• Free up developer time
• Leverage pre-built integrations
• Reduce time to scale infrastructure
• Reduce integration authentication and configuration workload

Don’t let integrations slow down your power packed SaaS product, increase your functionalities with native integrations, powered by embedded iPaaS. 

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Founded in 2005, Workday is a leading provider of financial, HR and planning software. It facilitates financial management, human capital management and analytics management for companies, students/ educational institutions and government agencies. They provide solutions across analytics and reporting, payroll, workforce management, spend management, talent management, professional services automation. 

For a detailed guied on Workday API integrations, read our in-depth guide to the Workday API. Below you will find a comprehensive directory of Workday API endpoints.

Workday API endpoints

While there are several Workday API endpoints, some of the top ones include:

Absence management

• GET /balances/{ID}
• GET /workers/{ID}/eligibleAbsenceTypes
• GET /workers/{ID}/leavesOfAbsence/{subresourceID}
• POST /workers/{ID}/requestTimeOff
• GET /workers/{ID}/validTimeOffDates
• GET /values/leave/status/
• GET /values/timeOff/status/

Compensation

• GET /scorecardResults
• GET /scorecards/{ID}
• POST /workers/{ID}/requestOneTimePayment

Payroll

• GET /jobs/{ID}/payGroup
• GET /payGroupDetails/{ID}
• POST /taxRates
• GET /values/payrollInputsGroup/payComponents/

Performance management

• GET /feedbackBadges/{ID}

Recruitment

• GET /interviews
• GET /interviews/{ID}/feedback
• GET /jobPostings/{ID}
• GET /prospects/{ID}/educations
• POST /prospects/{ID}/experiences
• GET /prospects/{ID}/resumeAttachments
• GET /prospects/{ID}/skills
• GET /values/common/countries/

Time tracking

• POST /timeClockEvents
• GET /timeValidations
• GET /workerTimeBlocks/{ID}
• POST /workers/{ID}/timeReviewEvents

Talent management

• POST /createMentorshipForMe
• POST /createMentorshipForWorker
• POST /mentorships/{ID}/close
• POST /mentorships/{ID}/edit

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Here’s a detailed guide on all Workday API endpoints as a ready reference.

Workday API use cases

• Financial management with accounting and finance, revenue management, grants management, analytics and reporting, audit and internal controls
• Human capital management via payroll and workforce management, talent, help, knowledge, and case management, workforce planning
• Adaptive ERP to automate and streamline plans, budgets, and forecasts and align headcount, sales, and operational plans
• Employee voice to collect and analyze feedback, with insights on employee experience to drives organizational success with AI
• Spend management with sourcing project intake, pipeline management, contract management, supplier onboarding and performance management

Workday API FAQs

Check out the top FAQs for Workday API to help you get started

1. Is a Workday WID a UUID? Answer
2. How to authenticate Workday SOAP API? Answer
3. How to receive real time notifications for my Workday? Answer
4. How to get a Workday worker / employee web profile URL? Answer
5. How to authenticate Spring SOAP to Workday? Answer
6. How to edit worker additional data using Workday API? Answer
7. How to create XSLT process Workday report - XML to JSON output - method="json" <xsl:output method="json" />? Answer
8. How to create a calculated Field in Workday with multiple conditions? Answer

Get started with Workday API

Workday doesn’t offer its pricing publicly and you can get in touch with their team for the same. However, if you are looking to integrate with multiple HRMS or Recruitment APIs in the shortest time, you can get started with Knit, one API for all top HR integrations.

To sign up for free, click here. To check the pricing, see our pricing page

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ADP API

ADP is an industry leader offering a comprehensive human capital management suite (HCM solutions), bringing together payroll, attendance, HR, time, insights, and other services under one roof. Overall, ADP offers a suite of APIs that developers can get access to via the ADP marketplace. The ADP marketplace contains two types of applications that developers can leverage based on their use case, i.e., Data Connector and End User Application. ADP APIs are designed using an event-based pattern for resource management. ADP provides RESTful APIs.

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ADP API follows OpenID Connect and Open Authorization (OAuth) 2.0 flows for comprehensive security. For each of them, ADP provides access tokens, which are used for secure calls to protect ADP Web APIs. Essentially, an access token is a time-bound token, or credential, which can be used to access protected ADP Web APIs restricted to an access scope. Access tokens are provided to the application during the integration process as part of the OpenID Connect and OAuth 2.0 authentication and authorization flow.

Related: ADP API Integration (In-Depth) Guide

ADP API Authentication

To access and interact with ADP's APIs and authenticate users via single sign-on (SSO), you'll need a Certificate Signing Request (CSR). Accessing ADP's web services requires both a private key and a corresponding Web Services (WS) Certificate. This certificate shares client information with ADP, while the private key verifies the client's authenticity.The WS Certificate can either be generated through an automated process (ideal for those building a marketplace application) or through a manual process (ideal for those building their own business application). To know more about each of these processes, click here.  

ADP API Events and Endpoints

ADP API (ADP Workforce Now) uses the following endpoints to facilitate the flow of information and data across channels.

Workers

Worker: A person who works/ performs duties for an organization

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Worker Images

• GET/hr/v2/workers/{aoid}/worker-images/photo

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Worker Profile Photo Management

• GET/events/hr/v1/worker.photo.remove/meta
• POST/events/hr/v1/worker.photo.remove
• POST/events/hr/v1/worker.photo.upload
• GET/events/hr/v1/worker.photo.upload/meta

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Workers Data Retrieval

• GET/hr/v2/workers/meta
• GET/hr/v2/workers/{aoid}
• GET/hr/v2/workers

Workers - Lifecycle Management

Worker.hire: Primary work assignment created between a worker/ person and the employer for the first time.

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Rehire Worker

• POST/events/hr/v1/worker.rehire
• GET/events/hr/v1/worker.rehire/meta

Workers - Data Integration Management

Read Worker

• GET/events/hr/v1/worker.read/meta
• POST/events/hr/v1/worker.read

Worker Demographics

Worker Demographics: Demographics and information for all workers as well as each worker specifically. 

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Worker Demographics

• GET/hr/v2/worker-demographics/meta
• GET/hr/v2/worker-demographics
• GET/hr/v2/worker-demographics/{aoid}

Worker Associate Profile - Personal & Work Info

Worker associate profile: Extensions to the worker profile containing hobbies/interests, bio, Standout roles, etc.

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Associate Preferred Gender Pronoun

• POST/events/hr/v1/worker.associate-profile.preferred-gender-pronoun.change
• GET/events/hr/v1/worker.associate-profile.preferred-gender-pronoun.change/meta

Workers - Compensation Management

Add Additional Remuneration

• POST/events/hr/v1/worker.work-assignment.additional-remuneration.add

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Change Additional Remuneration

• POST/events/hr/v1/worker.work-assignment.additional-remuneration.change

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Change Base Remuneration

• POST/events/hr/v1/worker.work-assignment.base-remuneration.change

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Remove Additional Remuneration

• POST/events/hr/v1/worker.work-assignment.additional-remuneration.remove

Workers - Work Assignment Management

Work assignment: Details such as a worker's Job Title and Job Function.

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Modify Assigned Organizational Units

• POST/events/hr/v1/worker.work-assignment.assigned-organizational-units.modify

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Modify Work Assignment

• GET/events/hr/v1/worker.work-assignment.modify/meta
• POST/events/hr/v1/worker.work-assignment.modify

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Modify Worker Reports 

• POST/events/hr/v1/worker.reports-to.modify

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Terminate Work Assignment

• POST/events/hr/v1/worker.work-assignment.terminate

Personal Contacts

Personal connects: To retrieve, add, update, and delete an associate's emergency contacts.

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Add Personal Contact

• GET/events/hr/v1/worker.personal-contact.add/meta
• POST/events/hr/v1/worker.personal-contact.add

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Change Personal Contact

• POST/events/hr/v1/worker.personal-contact.change
• GET/events/hr/v1/worker.personal-contact.change/meta

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Personal Contacts

• GET/hr/v2/associates/{aoid}/personal-contacts/meta
• GET/hr/v2/associates/{aoid}/personal-contacts
• GET/hr/v2/associates/{aoid}/personal-contacts/{personal-contact-id}

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Remove Personal Contact

• GET/events/hr/v1/worker.personal-contact.remove/meta
• POST/events/hr/v1/worker.personal-contact.remove

Worker Profile Experience (WFN)

Worker profile experience: Manage the HR Worker Profile implementation, add a new position for an employee and update the primary position of an employee, change the base remuneration details of an employee. 

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Compensation Management

• PUT/hr/worker-profile/v1/workers/{aoid}/work-assignments/{assignment-id}/base-remuneration
• GET/hr/worker-profile/v1/workers/{aoid}/work-assignments/{assignment-id}/base-remuneration/meta
• POST/hr/worker-profile/v1/workers/{aoid}/work-assignments/{assignment-id}/additional-remunerations
• GET/hr/worker-profile/v1/workers/{aoid}/work-assignments/{assignment-id}/additional-remunerations
• PUT/hr/worker-profile/v1/workers/{aoid}/work-assignments/{assignment-id}/additional-remunerations
• GET/hr/worker-profile/v1/workers/{aoid}/work-assignments/{assignment-id}/reportable-benefits/meta
• GET/hr/worker-profile/v1/workers/{aoid}/work-assignments/{assignment-id}/additional-remunerations/meta
• POST/hr/worker-profile/v1/workers/{aoid}/work-assignments/{assignment-id}/reportable-benefits
• GET/hr/worker-profile/v1/workers/{aoid}/work-assignments/{assignment-id}/reportable-benefits
• PUT/hr/worker-profile/v1/workers/{aoid}/work-assignments/{assignment-id}/reportable-benefits

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Corporate Groups Management

• POST/hr/worker-profile/v1/workers/{aoid}/work-assignments/{assignment-id}/corporate-groups
• GET/hr/worker-profile/v1/workers/{aoid}/work-assignments/{assignment-id}/corporate-groups/meta

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Position Data Management

• PUT/hr/worker-profile/v1/workers/{aoid}/work-assignments/{assignment-id}/worker-dates
• PUT/hr/worker-profile/v1/workers/{aoid}/work-assignments/{assignment-id}/primary-assignment

Workers - Business Communication Management

Add Worker Business Email

• POST/events/hr/v1/worker.business-communication.email.add

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Add Worker Business Fax

• POST/events/hr/v1/worker.business-communication.fax.add

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Add Worker Business Landline

• POST/events/hr/v1/worker.business-communication.landline.add

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Add Worker Business Mobile

• POST/events/hr/v1/worker.business-communication.mobile.add

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Add Worker Business Pager

• POST/events/hr/v1/worker.business-communication.pager.add

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Change Worker Business Email

• POST/events/hr/v1/worker.business-communication.email.change

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Change Worker Business Fax

• POST/events/hr/v1/worker.business-communication.fax.change

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Change Worker Business Landline

• POST/events/hr/v1/worker.business-communication.landline.change

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Change Worker Business Mobile

• POST/events/hr/v1/worker.business-communication.mobile.change

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Change Worker Business Pager

• POST/events/hr/v1/worker.business-communication.pager.change

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Remove Worker Business Email

• POST/events/hr/v1/worker.business-communication.email.remove

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Remove Worker Business Fax

• POST/events/hr/v1/worker.business-communication.fax.remove

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Remove Worker Business Landline

• POST/events/hr/v1/worker.business-communication.landline.remove

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Remove Worker Business Mobile

• POST/events/hr/v1/worker.business-communication.mobile.remove

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Remove Worker Business Pager

• POST/events/hr/v1/worker.business-communication.pager.remove

Corporate Directory

Corporate directory: List of corporate contacts or detailed information about a specific contact

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Corporate Directory

• GET/{sor-id}/hr/v1/corporate-contact-photos/{image-id}.{image-extension}

Work Assignment Management

Add Work Assignment

• POST/hr/v3/workers/{aoid}/work-assignments
• GET/hr/v3/workers/{aoid}/work-assignments/meta

Workers - Biological Data Management

Change Birth Date

• POST/events/hr/v1/worker.birth-date.change

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Change Gender

• POST/events/hr/v1/worker.gender.change

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Change Race

• POST/events/hr/v1/worker.race.change

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Change Worker Gender Identity

• POST/events/hr/v1/worker.gender-identity.change
• GET/events/hr/v1/worker.gender-identity.change/meta

Workers - Demographic Data Management

Change Birth Name

• POST/events/hr/v1/worker.birth-name.change

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Change Legal Name

• POST/events/hr/v1/worker.legal-name.change

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Change Preferred Name

• GET/events/hr/v1/worker.preferred-name.change/meta
• POST/events/hr/v1/worker.preferred-name.change

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Change Worker Marital Status

• POST/events/hr/v1/worker.marital-status.change

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Change Worker Military Classification

• POST/events/hr/v1/worker.military-classification.change

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Change Worker Military Status

• POST/events/hr/v1/worker.military-status.change

Workers - Personal Communication Management

Add Worker Legal Address

• POST/events/hr/v1/worker.legal-address.add

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Add Worker Personal Address

• POST/events/hr/v1/worker.personal-address.add

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Add Worker Personal Email

• POST/events/hr/v1/worker.personal-communication.email.add

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Add Worker Personal Fax

• POST/events/hr/v1/worker.personal-communication.fax.add

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Add Worker Personal Landline

• POST/events/hr/v1/worker.personal-communication.landline.add

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Add Worker Personal Mobile

• POST/events/hr/v1/worker.personal-communication.mobile.add

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Add Worker Personal Pager

• POST/events/hr/v1/worker.personal-communication.pager.add

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Change Worker Legal Address

• POST/events/hr/v1/worker.legal-address.change

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Change Worker Personal Address

• POST/events/hr/v1/worker.personal-address.change

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Change Worker Personal Email

• POST/events/hr/v1/worker.personal-communication.email.change

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Change Worker Personal Fax

• POST/events/hr/v1/worker.personal-communication.fax.change

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Change Worker Personal Landline

• POST/events/hr/v1/worker.personal-communication.landline.change

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Change Worker Personal Mobile

• POST/events/hr/v1/worker.personal-communication.mobile.change

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Change Worker Personal Pager

• POST/events/hr/v1/worker.personal-communication.pager.change

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Remove Worker Legal Address

• POST/events/hr/v1/worker.legal-address.remove

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Remove Worker Personal Address

• POST/events/hr/v1/worker.personal-address.remove

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Remove Worker Personal Email

• POST/events/hr/v1/worker.personal-communication.email.remove

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Remove Worker Personal Fax

• POST/events/hr/v1/worker.personal-communication.fax.remove

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Remove Worker Personal Landline

• POST/events/hr/v1/worker.personal-communication.landline.remove

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Remove Worker Personal Mobile

• POST/events/hr/v1/worker.personal-communication.mobile.remove

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Remove Worker Personal Pager

• POST/events/hr/v1/worker.personal-communication.pager.remove
• GET/events/hr/v1/worker.personal-communication.pager.remove/meta

Workers - Work Deployment Management

Change Standard Hours

• POST/events/hr/v1/worker.work-assignment.standard-hours.change

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Change Worker Type

• POST/events/hr/v1/worker.work-assignment.worker-type.change

Workers - Custom Data Management

Change Worker Custom Percentage

• GET/events/hr/v1/worker.custom-field.percentage.change/meta
• POST/events/hr/v1/worker.custom-field.percentage.change

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Change Worker Custom Telephone

• POST/events/hr/v1/worker.custom-field.telephone.change
• GET/events/hr/v1/worker.custom-field.telephone.change/meta

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Manage Worker Custom Amount

• GET/events/hr/v1/worker.custom-field.amount.change/meta
• POST/events/hr/v1/worker.custom-field.amount.change

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Manage Worker Custom Code

• POST/events/hr/v1/worker.custom-field.code.change
• GET/events/hr/v1/worker.custom-field.code.change/meta

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Manage Worker Custom Date

• GET/events/hr/v1/worker.custom-field.date.change/meta
• POST/events/hr/v1/worker.custom-field.date.change

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Manage Worker Custom Indicator

• POST/events/hr/v1/worker.custom-field.indicator.change
• GET/events/hr/v1/worker.custom-field.indicator.change/meta

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Manage Worker Custom Number

• POST/events/hr/v1/worker.custom-field.number.change
• GET/events/hr/v1/worker.custom-field.number.change/meta

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Manage Worker Custom String

• POST/events/hr/v1/worker.custom-field.string.change
• GET/events/hr/v1/worker.custom-field.string.change/meta

Workers - Identification Management

Add Worker Government ID

• POST/events/hr/v1/worker.government-id.add

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Change Worker Government ID

• POST/events/hr/v1/worker.government-id.change

Workers - Person Custom Data Management

Change Person Custom Amount

• POST/events/hr/v1/worker.person.custom-field.amount.change
• GET/events/hr/v1/worker.person.custom-field.amount.change/meta

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Change Person Custom Code

• POST/events/hr/v1/worker.person.custom-field.code.change
• GET/events/hr/v1/worker.person.custom-field.code.change/meta

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Change Person Custom Date

• GET/events/hr/v1/worker.person.custom-field.date.change/meta
• POST/events/hr/v1/worker.person.custom-field.date.change

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Change Person Custom Indicator

• POST/events/hr/v1/worker.person.custom-field.indicator.change
• GET/events/hr/v1/worker.person.custom-field.indicator.change/meta

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Change Person Custom Number

• POST/events/hr/v1/worker.person.custom-field.number.change
• GET/events/hr/v1/worker.person.custom-field.number.change/meta

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Change Person Custom Percentage

• POST/events/hr/v1/worker.person.custom-field.percentage.change
• GET/events/hr/v1/worker.person.custom-field.percentage.change/meta

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Change Person Custom String

• POST/events/hr/v1/worker.person.custom-field.string.change
• GET/events/hr/v1/worker.person.custom-field.string.change/meta

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Change Person Custom Telephone

• GET/events/hr/v1/worker.person.custom-field.telephone.change/meta
• POST/events/hr/v1/worker.person.custom-field.telephone.change

Worker Leaves

Worker leaves: Processing an employee's leave requests, changes, and return and leave cancellations.

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Cancel Worker Leave

• GET/events/hr/v1/worker.leave.cancel/meta
• POST/events/hr/v1/worker.leave.cancel

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Change Worker Leave

• POST/events/hr/v1/worker.leave.change
• GET/events/hr/v1/worker.leave.change/meta

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Request Leave Of Absence

• GET/events/hr/v1/worker.leave.absence.request/meta
• POST/events/hr/v1/worker.leave.absence.request

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Request Return From Leave Of Absence

• POST/events/hr/v1/worker.leave.return.request
• GET/events/hr/v1/worker.leave.return.request/meta

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Worker Leaves

• GET/hr/v2/workers/{aoid}/leaves

Workers - KSAOC Management

Change Worker Highest Education Level

• POST/events/hr/v1/worker.highest-level-education.change
• GET/events/hr/v1/worker.highest-level-education.change/meta

ADP API Use Cases

• Easy to use, intuitive interface and highly customizable with efficient customer support
• Access best-practice guides, HR forms, policies, and an employee handbook template
• Automation of processes like onboarding, status change, offboarding
• Providing employees access to to their pay, benefits and time information, offering true self service
• Real time mobile phone access to important information like time off, benefits data, etc. with a mobile application
• Tracking and monitoring of key metrics like labor costs, overtime, actual vs. scheduled hours, turnover rate for better HR services

Top Customers

• Jelly Belly, gourmet jelly belly candies and confections manufacturer
• Amazon, a vast Internet-based enterprise
• The Boston Globe, an American daily newspaper
• Dell Technologies, a provider of desktop personal computers, software, and peripherals
• Sunstone Partners, a growth-oriented private equity firm

ADP API FAQs

Here is a comprehensive list of questions that can help you navigate ADP API for success:

1. How to obtain ADP API Client Secret for OAuth? Answer
2. How to get ADP API past SSL error? Answer
3. How to update ADP API Worker Information? Answer
4. How to get Powershell ADP API Token? Answer
5. How to Solve ADP API Connection Problem(Error : Status-58)? Answer
6. How to change a person's custom string using ADP's API? Answer
7. How to get access_token from ADP Api using rest? Answer
8. What is the latest API updated or released for ADP Workforce Now? Answer
9. What is the release plan for ADP Workforce Now APIs? Answer
10. What are latest API updated or released for RUN Powered by ADP? Answer
11. What APIs will be released or enhanced for RUN Powered by ADP soon? Answer
12. How to integrate ADP employee data in Wordpress? Answer
13. How to read properties from an ADP project by C#? Answer

Common Integrations with ADP API

While there can be multiple integrations and use cases for ADP API, here is a list of the top SaaS companies or products that can integrate with ADP API to facilitate customer success:

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• Learning Management Solutions
• Rewards, Recognitions, and Performance
• Communication and Collaborations
• Employee Travel and Booking Tools
• Workforce Planning and Org Chart Solutions

How to integrate with ADP API

Here is a comprehensive resource for anyone who wishes to integrate with ADP API and streamline and optimize their HR and allied operations. 

Get started with ADP API 

The pricing for ADP API is not publicly available. However, the platform does offer a demo for interested customers. At the same time, ADP provides tailor-made pricing based on specific company requirements. Thus companies can share the required information to get access to competitive pricing, across different tiers based on the features they need. You can request pricing here.

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To make the integration process smooth with ADP, you can get started with Knit, one API for all your integrations. Sign up with Knit or book a demo here with one of our experts - Book Demo

‍

greytHR API Directory

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greytHR is a leading HR and Payroll software provider for small and medium sized companies. It enables HR teams and professionals to automate all people operations including employee information management, leave and attendance management, training, appraisals, compensation, etc. greytHR API enables developers to access HR related information like Employee/Leave/Attendance/Salary for seamless exchange between different applications. 

greytHR API Authentication

greytHR is based on oAuth2 based authentication for access to APIs, which is an industry-standard protocol for authorization. Since the greytHR API captures a lot of sensitive and confidential information, only authorized entities get access to it. Each API request is authenticated with an auth-token using the client id and client credentials obtained during the registration process. A verified username and password is used for basic authentication. 

greytHR API API Objects, Data Models & Endpoints

If you are working with greytHR API for integration with other applications, it is important to understand the data models, objects and endpoints to facilitate data normalization and accurate API requests. Some of these are captured below to help you get started. 

Employee

• GET Get all Employees: https://api.greythr.com/employee/v2/employees?page=1&size=35 
• GET Get Employee: https://api.greythr.com/employee/v2/employees/{employee-id}
• GET Employee Lookup: https://api.greythr.com/employee/v2/employees/lookup?q={EmployeeNo./Email/Guid/Access card/ Personal email}
• POST Add Employee: https://api.greythr.com/employee/v2/employees
• PUT Update Employee: https://api.greythr.com/employee/v2/employees/{employee-id}
• GET Get All Employee Profile Details: https://api.greythr.com/employee/v2/employees/profile
• GET GET All employees Photo: https://api.greythr.com/hr/v2/employees/photo?photoSize=large&page=1&size=0
• GET Get Employee Photo: https://api.greythr.com/hr/v2/employee/{employeeId}/photo
• GET Get Employee Profile Details: https://api.greythr.com/employee/v2/employees/{employee-id}/profile
• PUT Update Employee Profile Details: https://api.greythr.com/employee/v2/employees/{employee-id}/profile
• GET Get All Employee Personal Details: https://api.greythr.com/employee/v2/employees/personal
• GET Get Employee Personal Details: https://api.greythr.com/employee/v2/employees/{employee-id}/personal
• PUT Update Employee Personal Details: https://api.greythr.com/employee/v2/employees/{employee-id}/personal
• GET Get All Employee Work Details: https://api.greythr.com/employee/v2/employees/work
• GET Get Employee Work Details Copy: https://api.greythr.com/employee/v2/employees/{employee-id}/work
• PUT Update Employee Work Details: https://api.greythr.com/employee/v2/employees/{employee-id}/work
• GET Get All Employee Separation Details: https://api.greythr.com/employee/v2/employees/separation
• GET Get Employee Separation Details Copy: https://api.greythr.com/employee/v2/employees/{employee-id}/separation
• PUT Update Employee Separation Details: https://api.greythr.com/employee/v2/employees/{employee-id}/separation
• GET Get All Employee Address Details: https://api.greythr.com/employee/v2/employees/addresses/{address-type}
• GET Get Employee Address Details: https://api.greythr.com/employee/v2/employees/{employee-id}/addresses/{address-type}
• PUT Update Employee Address Details: https://api.greythr.com/employee/v2/employees/{employee-id}/addresses/{address-type}
• DELETE Delete Employee Address Details: https://api.greythr.com/employee/v2/employees/{employee-id}/addresses/{address-type}
• GET Get All Employee Statutory Details: https://api.greythr.com/employee/v2/employees/statutory/india
• GET Get Employee Statutory Details: https://api.greythr.com/employee/v2/employees/{employee-id}/statutory/india
• PUT Update Employee Statutory Details: https://api.greythr.com/employee/v2/employees/{employee-id}/statutory/india
• GET Get Orgtree - Reporting Structure: https://api.greythr.com/employee/v2/employees/org-tree
• GET Get Employee Manager details: https://api.greythr.com/employee/v2/employees/{employee-id}/org-tree
• POST Add Employee Manager: https://api.greythr.com/employee/v2/employees/{employee-id}/org-tree
• PUT Update Employee Manager: https://api.greythr.com/employee/v2/employees/{employee-id}/org-tree
• GET Get All Employee Positions details: https://api.greythr.com/employee/v2/employees/categories
• GET Get Employee Positions Details: https://api.greythr.com/employee/v2/employees/{employee-id}/categories
• POST Add Employee Positions: https://api.greythr.com/employee/v2/employees/{employee-id}/categories
• GET Get All Employee Bank Details: https://api.greythr.com/employee/v2/employees/bank
• GET Get Employee Bank Details: https://api.greythr.com/employee/v2/employees/{employee-id}/bank
• POST Add Employee Bank Details: https://api.greythr.com/employee/v2/employees/{employee-id}/bank
• PUT Update Employee Bank Details: https://api.greythr.com/employee/v2/employees/{employee-id}/bank
• GET Get All Employee PF & ESI details: https://api.greythr.com/employee/v2/employees/pf
• GET Get Employee PF & ESI details: https://api.greythr.com/employee/v2/employees/{employee-id}/pf
• POST Add Employee PF & ESI details: https://api.greythr.com/employee/v2/employees/{employee-id}/pf
• PUT Update Employee PF & ESI details: https://api.greythr.com/employee/v2/employees/{employee-id}/pf
• GET Get Employee's All Identity Details: https://api.greythr.com/employee/v2/employees/{employee-id}/identities
• GET Get Employee Identity Details: https://api.greythr.com/employee/v2/employees/{employee-id}/identities/{identity-code}
• POST Add Employee Identity: https://api.greythr.com/employee/v2/employees/{employee-id}/identities/{identity-code}
• PUT Update Employee Identity: https://api.greythr.com/employee/v2/employees/{employee-id}/identities/{identity-code}
• DELETE Delete Employee Identity: https://api.greythr.com/employee/v2/employees/{employee-id}/identities/{identity-code}
• GET Get Employees Family Details: https://api.greythr.com/employee/v2/employees/families/{relationtype-id}
• GET Get Employee Family Details: https://api.greythr.com/employee/v2/employees/{employee-id}/families
• POST Add family member to Employee: https://api.greythr.com/employee/v2/employees/{employee-id}/families
• PUT Update Family member details: https://api.greythr.com/employee/v2/employees/{employee-id}/families/{relation-id}
• DELETE Delete Family member details: https://api.greythr.com/employee/v2/employees/{employee-id}/families/{relation-id}
• GET Get All Employee Asset details: https://api.greythr.com/employee/v2/employees/assets
• GET Get Employee Asset details: https://api.greythr.com/employee/v2/employees/{employee-id}/assets
• POST Add Asset to Employee: https://api.greythr.com/employee/v2/employees/{employee-id}/assets
• POST Add Asset to Employee: https://api.greythr.com/employee/v2/employees/{employee-id}/assets
• DELETE Delete Update Family member details: https://api.greythr.com/employee/v2/employees/{employee-id}/assets/{asset-id}
• GET Get All Employee Qualifications details: https://api.greythr.com/employee/v2/employees/qualifications
• GET Get Employee Qualifications details: https://api.greythr.com/employee/v2/employees/{employee-id}/qualifications
• POST Add Employee Qualifications: https://api.greythr.com/employee/v2/employees/{employee-id}/qualifications
• PUT Update Employee Qualifications details: https://api.greythr.com/employee/v2/employees/{employee-id}/qualifications/{qualification-id}
• DELETE Delete Employee Qualifications details: https://api.greythr.com/employee/v2/employees/{employee-id}/qualifications/{qualification-id}
• GET Get Employee All Card Details: https://apigee-test.greythr.com/employee/v2/employees/{employeeId}/card-details
• GET Get Employee Card Details: https://apigee-test.greythr.com/employee/v2/employees/employeeId/card-details/cardId
• POST Add Employee Card Details: https://apigee-test.greythr.com/employee/v2/employees/{employeeId}/card-details
• DELETE Delete Employee Card Details: https://apigee-test.greythr.com/employee/v2/employees/{employeeId}/card-details/{cardId}

Leave

• GET Get Leave Balance details for All Employees: https://api.greythr.com/leave/v2/employee/years/{{Year}}/balance
• GET Get Employee Leave Balance for a year: https://api.greythr.com/leave/v2/employee/{employee-id}/years/{{Year}}/balance
• GET Get Leave Transactions details for All Employees: https://api.greythr.com/leave/v2/employee/transactions?start={{StartDate}}&end={{EndDate}}
• GET Get Employee Leave Transactions: https://api.greythr.com/leave/v2/employee/{employee-id}/transactions?start={{StartDate}}&end={{EndDate}}
• POST Leave Transaction: https://api.greythr.com/leave/v2/employee/transactions

Attendance

• GET Get Attendance Summary for All Employees: https://api.greythr.com/attendance/v2/employee/insights?end={{EndDate}}&start={{StartDate}}
• GET Get Employee Attendance Summary: https://api.greythr.com/attendance/v2/employee/{employee-id}/insights?end={{EndDate}}&start={{StartDate}}
• GET Get Employee Attendance Summary: https://api.greythr.com/attendance/v2/employee/{employee-id}/insights?end={{EndDate}}&start={{StartDate}}
• GET Get Employee Attendance Muster: https://api.greythr.com/attendance/v2/employee/{employee-id}/muster?end={{EndDate}}&start={{StartDate}}

Payroll

• GET Get All Employee Handenrty salary Items: https://api.greythr.com/payroll/v2/employees/handentry
• GET Get Employee Handenrty salary Items: https://api.greythr.com/payroll/v2/employees/{employee-id}
• GET Get Salary Repository Items: https://api.greythr.com/payroll/v2/salary/repository
• POST Add Employee Handenrty salary Items: https://api.greythr.com/payroll/v2/employees/{employee-id}
• PUT Update Employee Handenrty salary Items: https://api.greythr.com/payroll/v2/employees/{employee-id}
• DELETE Delete Employee Handenrty salary Items: https://api.greythr.com/payroll/v2/employees/{employee-id}
• GET Get Salary Statement for a Month: https://api.greythr.com/payroll/v2/employees/salary/statement/{{yyyy-mm-01}}
• GET Get Salary Statement for an Employee for a Month: https://api.greythr.com/payroll/v2/employees/salary/statement/{{yyyy-mm-01}}/{employee-id}
• GET Get Employees Resettlement for a Month: https://api.greythr.com/payroll/v2/employees/resettlement/{payrollMonth}
• POST Add Salary Revision: https://api.greythr.com/payroll/v2/salary/revision/employees/{employee-id}
• GET Get Salary Revision History: https://api.greythr.com/payroll/v2/salary/revision/employees/{employee-id}/{status}
• GET Get Salary Revision Difference: https://api.greythr.com/payroll/v2/salary/revision/difference/employees/{employee-id}
• GET Get Attendance Snapshot details: https://apigee-test.greythr.com/payroll/v2/attendance/snapshot/employees/{employee-id}
• POST Save Attendance Snapshot: https://apigee-test.greythr.com/payroll/v2/attendance/snapshot/employees/{employee-id}
• DELETE Delete Attendance Snapshot: https://apigee-test.greythr.com/payroll/v2/attendance/snapshot/employees/{employee-id}

List of Values

• POST Get greytHR LOV: https://api.greythr.com/hr/v2/lov
• POST Get greytHR Position/Category: https://api.greythr.com/hr/v2/lov
• GET Get Bank Branch Details: https://api.greythr.com/hr/v2/lov/banks/{bankId}/branches
• POST Add greytHR Org Entities: https://api.greythr.com/hr/v2/lov/org/entities

Documents

• GET Get Employee Documents: https://api.greythr.com/employee/v2/emp-docs/{employeeId}/{categoryId}
• GET Download Employee Documents: https://api.greythr.com/employee/v2/emp-docs/{employeeId}/{documentId}/{fieId}
• POST Add Employee Document Category: https://api.greythr.com/employee/v2/emp-docs/category
• POST Add Employee Document: https://api.greythr.com/employee/v2/employee-docs/{employeeId}/{category}

Users

• POST Add New Users: https://api.greythr.com/user/v2/users
• GET Get Users List: https://api.greythr.com/user/v2/users
• GET Get Employee User ID: https://api.greythr.com/user/v2/users?userType=employee&userName=Employee Number
• POST User SSO: https://api.greythr.com/user/v2/users/{userid}/auth

greytHR API Use Cases 

• Centralized employee information management and simplification of HR processes by eliminating inconsistencies, duplication and clutter in employee information
• Easy payroll management with accurate and timely payouts
• Seamless leave management with accurate leave accounting and integration with payroll
• Real time attendance management, easy shift and overtime management
• Goal alignment and performance management, progress tracking, rewards achievements

Top customers

greytHR provides HRMS services to 20,000+ companies across 250+ cities, including:

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• Dunzo, a 24x7 delivery app
• HealthifyMe, an Indian digital health and wellness company
• Rapido, an Indian ride-hailing service
• Hutchinson, a French manufacturer of non-tire rubber
• Lentra, a new-age domain-native platform 
• ClickDesk, a live support chat software 
• CORE Energy Systems, an emerging engineering services and project management company

greytHR API FAQs

• How can admin enable the role for API users? Answer
• How to generate API credentials for the greytHR admins? Answer
• Is it possible to configure API credentials in Tally without enabling the integration of greytHR? Answer

How to integrate with greytHR API 

To integrate with the greytHR API, you need to create an account. You can create an account here. You can then go through this documentation to understand the REST API for external applications to integrate and interoperate with greytHR. 

Get started with greytHR API 

greytHR offers a freemium model for its users. While some features for a certain number of employees can be availed free of cost, the paid version starts at ₹3495/month adding more features which users can leverage. There are more premium tiers to choose from. Each pricing plan comes with a free trial. 

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However, integrating with greytHR API with in-house resources can be quite expensive and time consuming, for both building and managing the integration. You can significantly bring this cost down by partnering with a platform like Knit. With a nominal integration cost, Knit helps you integrate with a unified HRIS API, with which you can connect with its bouquet of HRIS applications, including greytHR, at no additional cost. As a unified API, Knit helps you connect with your preferred HRIS applications in a fraction of the cost and time. Book a demo today to learn more!