Generic SFTP - Syncing Your Employee Data with Reflektive

It is crucial that your organization sends Reflektive specially formatted employee information from the very start. If your team abides by our standards, than the transmission of information, which includes updates to employee status and relationship, becomes a painless process, and it reduces the task and upkeep of information management to a nearly automated process. 

We'll go over a few basic things that we look for:

• We require that your Human Resources Information System (HRIS) be able to export data reports in Excel's .csv format  (UTF-8 encoded), which would contain basic information about your employees. A few HRIS systems that many of our customers use that fall under this category:
  • ADP
  • Paylocity
  • Ceridian
  • UltiPro
  • Many more!
    
    
• Required Fields
  • Employee Unique User Identification (UUID)
  • Employee's email address
  • First and last name in a single cell
  • Employee's manager's email address
    
    
• Optional Fields
  • Department
  • Location
  • Hire Date (please put this in mm/dd/yyyy format)
  • Gender
  • Other Additional Fields (see below point)
    
    
• If you want to import the additional non-required demographic fields such as department, location, start date, or whatever else, that’s fine. If you want to import even more information, you can create additional headers, but know that this information will NOT be displayed in Reflektive. However, in data exports from Reflektive, you will see that this information is retained. Keep in mind though, that our cap is at 14 total demographic fields (we provide and recommend staying at 10), to try to prioritize which ones are the most important to your organization to capture.
  
  
• If your company meets our initial requirements, we then try to set up a recurring sync so that our systems are able to stay up to date and that all your employee information is good to go. Your organization HAS to send us the full file each time (meaning, it contains ALL ACTIVE EMPLOYEES). New employees are added, and terminated users are omitted from your data sheet. Additionally, relational changes (eg: employees are promoted or have changed teams, and thus have new managers) must be accounted for in the manager's column.
  
  
• Before you send us this data, we have templates (we attached a template "accounts.csv" below which has the required headers - remember, everything MUST match with what you see in the template) that you can reference to ensure that Reflektive is ingesting clean data. Even small errors can prevent our system from accepting your data, so an eye for detail is very important when you format your data for us.  

Below is a screenshot of a template with dummy data for you to view. Remember, all headers (everything in Row 1) must match the template exactly.

Some Caveats

• For certain employees, like a CEO, please leave the manager_login field blank, since they aren't reporting to anyone.
• If an employee has a new manager, place make sure that it is updated in the manager_login field.
• If you have nothing to put in the Optional fields, it's okay to leave it blank.
• For avatar_file_name, you MUST own a publicly accessible folder with direct URLs to your employee images. The pictures must be a square (eg: 64x64px, 256x256px, 1024x1024px etc), and in a .jpg or .png file format.
• If your HRIS system produces a unique ID number for your employees, please put it in the external_uuid field. The system will use this as a primary identifier in addition to the employee email address.
  • Remember, all clients using any HRIS sync (SFTP, BambooHR, or Workday) employees must have an external UUID, otherwise the system will not be able to accurately determine which employees should be terminated. 

Beyond Reflektive's HRIS integrations with Workday and BambooHR, getting large data-sets containing your employee data to Reflektive can seem like a daunting task. Thankfully, Reflektive has a standardized process in place, involving uploading your data in bulk to our SFTP server, for customers who use other HRIS systems that we do not directly integrate with.

If your organization qualifies and is able to take advantage of this service, a technical representative from Reflektive will create a secure folder on our server for your organization to access. The representative will then work with you to complete configuration and then grant your team access.

You will need to prepare a few things:

• Download a FTP client. Filezilla and Cyberduck are popular choices, and are both available on OSX and Windows.
• If you have a preferred password you would like to use, pass that long to the technical representative. If not, Reflektive will randomly generate one for you and pass it through.
• Be able to export your employee information in a UTF-8 formatted excel .csv file. 

Once those things are prepared and the SFTP server is configured from our side, please follow these instructions:

• Use your FTP client and open a connection to Reflektive (refer to below screenshot for an example).
  • Protocol: SFTP (SSH File Transfer Protocol)
  • Address: account-sync.reflektive.com
  • Port: 22
  • Username: This is provided to you by our technical representative
  • Password: This is either provided to you by our technical representative, or set by your team
    

• Once connected (feel free to save the credentials so you don't have to type it in each time), go to the accounts folder.
• Upload your file, accounts.csv in this folder.
• That's it! You're done.

Other Notes

• The frequency of this data upload and subsequent import into Reflektive is something that your team needs to discuss with your Customer Success Advocate. Typically, most companies upload and sync their data on a weekly or bi-weekly basis. However, Reflektive is able to also able to perform this task on an ad-hoc basis, if there are special circumstances that require you to have updated data in Reflektive.
• In order to further automate this on your end, your IT team will have to build a task that automatically pulls the correct report from your HRIS system and then transmit the file to our SFTP server. Otherwise, your organization is responsible for having someone perform this task manually at whatever cadence we have agreed upon.