4 ways to automate BambooHR

Whether you work in HR or another department entirely, you’ve likely heard of BambooHR. It’s probably the tool you use to request time off or check your employment details since it’s one of the most popular tools for hiring, paying, managing, and rewarding employees. 

But keeping up with all the related tasks can quickly become overwhelming as your team grows and your business starts to scale. That’s why connecting BambooHR to the rest of your tech stack through Zapier can help. With just a few Zaps (what we call automated workflows), you can automatically onboard new employees, keep track of reports, and help manage time off. Take a look. 

Table of contents:

Manage your (and your team’s) time off

If you’re managing a large team or juggling a lot of tasks, it can be easy for smaller to-dos like approving time-off requests or recording holidays in your team’s calendar to fall through the cracks. 

To accurately keep track of your team schedule and availability for work projects, you can use these Zaps to send time off requests directly to where everyone’s bound to see it: your team chat app. You can even generate summaries of who’s out for the week in Slack or automatically create Google Calendar events to block that time out in the employee’s calendar.

Managing projects and getting work done is much easier when you know who is available, especially if you work on cross-functional projects or manage a large team.

Add new employees to BambooHR

Before you can even begin onboarding your new employees, you’ll want to make sure they’re properly set up in BambooHR with all the correct details. That might include full names, addresses, and any other work-related documents. 

You might use a form to collect these details from the candidates themselves, for example, or maybe you use a spreadsheet to store this information. Whatever the case, you don’t need to manually create or upload this information to BambooHR. Instead, you can use automation to fill the gaps. With these Zaps, whenever a new candidate is submitted via a form or database, they’ll be added automatically to BambooHR. 

Help onboard new employees

Now comes the fun part: onboarding your new employees. This process will work differently at every company, but the basics remain the same: you’ll want to send them welcome emails, assign them onboarding tasks, and set them up with the right tools. 

With automation, you can make sure they receive everything they need as soon as they start work. From assigning new employees tasks in Asana to sending them the right training materials in GoTo Training, these Zaps have you covered: 

Streamline payroll and expenses

Alongside onboarding, sorting out payroll for your new employees is another task best handled automatically. And that’s not just for new employees; you’ll also want to make sure to update any payroll changes when salary or job position changes are made in BambooHR.

Fortunately, you can do all this automatically. Use these Zaps to add employees (and updated employees) directly to tools like QuickBooks or Xero. That way, you can make sure your payroll system is always up to date without manual data entry, saving you time and reducing errors.

Automate the employee experience

They say simplicity is the only thing that scales. The good news is that BambooHR makes human resources processes as simple as possible. 

And, when you pair BambooHR with Zapier, you can automate the onboarding process for new employees, manage time off, and sync payroll tasks across the board. You’ll free your people to focus on the more important work of building a company that can scale.

This article was originally published in November 2022, written by Daniel Kenitz. It was most recently updated in July 2024 by Elena Alston.