Keep the chart true without tending it
Connect BambooHR or Gusto and the chart follows the HR system: new starters appear, leavers come off, reporting lines move when they move. Your own edits are kept where they should be. This page is the whole contract — the five fields that sync, the rules that decide who wins, and the two providers that work today.
What syncs
Five fields per person. Everything else on the chart is yours.
Name
First and last as HR holds them. A person renamed in the HR system is renamed on every chart that follows it.
Title
From the primary job. If you have set a title on the chart, your title stays: an override survives every sync until you clear it.
Department
Becomes the card colour, the same as a department typed by hand. Overrides work here too.
Manager
The reporting line. A manager the sync cannot resolve leaves the person where they are rather than moving them to the root.
Employment type
Full-time, part-time, contractor, intern. Contractors keep their card and their tag; terminated people come off the chart.
Who wins when they disagree
The rules are fixed and the same every time, so a sync is never a surprise.
- The HR system is the source of truth for those five fields, for every person it knows about.
- Except where you set a title or a department on the chart yourself. Those overrides survive every sync until you clear them.
- People the HR system has never heard of — a vacancy, an advisor, a role you are planning — are never touched.
- Someone terminated in the HR system comes off the chart. Their reports move up to their manager, the same as deleting a card by hand.
- A manager who cannot be resolved leaves the person where they are. Newcomers with nobody to report to start at the top until you place them.
- The first sync onto an existing chart matches people by name where the match is unambiguous, and adds everyone else.
- Nothing is random. The same data always produces the same chart, and a loop in the HR data cannot put a loop on the chart.
The two that work today
BambooHR
Nothing to set up on our side: you paste an API key and your subdomain into the connect screen, and the first sync starts. Reads the employee directory including manager, department, job title, hire and termination dates.
Gusto
Connects with OAuth: you approve access in Gusto and the connection is made. Reads the same fields from the primary job, so someone with two jobs charts under the one they mostly do.
Rippling, Workday and Personio authenticate through the same connector, but each needs its employee sync written and run against a real tenant before it goes on this page. Ask, and it moves up the list.
Questions people ask
- Which HR systems work today?
- BambooHR and Gusto. Both connect through Nango, which runs the sync on its own schedule and tells us when something changed; we pull the records, apply the rules on this page, and write the result into the chart as a system actor so anyone with it open sees the change arrive. Rippling, Workday and Personio are on request: they authenticate through the same connector, but each needs its employee sync written and tested against a real tenant before we will offer it.
- How often does it sync?
- Every six hours, plus whenever the HR system tells us something changed, plus whenever you press Sync in the editor. A missed webhook is covered by the six-hour pass.
- Will it overwrite the chart I have already built?
- Only the five fields above, and only for people it knows. Your layout, your dotted lines, your vacancies, your title overrides and anyone you added yourself are untouched. The first sync is the one to watch: it links people by name, and anything it could not match arrives as a new card for you to place.
- What does it cost?
- It is part of Business, $199 a year, which is also where API keys and webhooks land when they ship. There is no per-employee price.
- Do photos sync?
- Not yet. The unified employee record we read does not carry one, so photos stay something you upload on the chart. If your HR system exposes them, say so and it moves up the list.
- How do I disconnect?
- From the same Sync dialog. Disconnecting removes the connection and stops the sync; the chart stays exactly as it was at the last sync, and every card is yours to edit again.
A chart that stays right
Sync is part of Business. Build the chart first — that part is free, at any size — and connect the HR system when keeping it current stops being something anyone has time for.