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Human resources ⇄ Accounting and finance

Paylocity to Workday integration — real-time, two-way sync

Keep Paylocity and Workday in sync without custom scripts. Cut weeks of integration work, eliminate silent data drift, and give your team a single, reliable source of truth.

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Adopted by fast-scaling companies moving mission-critical data in real time

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Why teams connect Paylocity and Workday

Keep the employee, department, and cost records that Workday and Paylocity share consistent in real time, so the finance system and the people system stop drifting apart.

Workday runs the money side of the company: who gets paid, what it costs, and which part of the business the cost belongs to. Paylocity runs the people side: who works here, which team they sit in, and how their employment changes over time. The two overlap on the same people and the same org structure, because every employee is also a payee and every department is also a cost center. When that overlap is maintained by hand, a new hire, a transfer, or a termination has to be keyed twice, and the two systems start to disagree about who is active and where the cost lands.

Stacksync syncs Payroll Results, Suppliers, Customers and Invoices, Journal Entries in Workday with Custom Fields, Employees, Onboarding, Deductions (Pay Setup) in Paylocity bi-directionally and in real time. A person added, updated, or deactivated on either side appears on the other within seconds, with field-level mapping and conflict resolution in place of CSV exports and nightly batch jobs.

That matters most when money follows a people event. A hire that finance can pay, a leaver whose access ends, a transfer that redirects cost to the right team, all happen from one change instead of two, so headcount and spend reconcile from the same set of records.

Common use cases

  • 01 Push completed payroll results into a finance system or data warehouse each pay cycle.
  • 02 Import journal entries from external billing or expense systems into Workday Financials.
  • 03 Push hired candidates from an ATS into Paylocity via the Onboarding endpoint, then read Onboarding Status to confirm the record before the first payroll run.
  • 04 Upsert recurring Deductions and Earnings on employee records when benefits or 401(k) elections change in a benefits admin system, without re-keying payroll setup.

Common sync patterns

People-driven costs land in finance

Compensation, reimbursements, or other costs tied to a person on the Paylocity side flow into Workday for posting, so the books reflect what people actually cost without manual re-entry.

New person becomes a known record in finance

When someone is added in Paylocity, a matching employee or payee record appears in Workday, ready for payroll, expenses, or cost allocation without anyone rekeying the details.

One employee identity

A person's name, ID, or contact details corrected in either system update the other, so finance and HR reference the same person instead of maintaining two versions.

What you can sync between Paylocity and Workday

Representative objects on each side — any object or custom field can map to any target. Schemas are auto-detected; types are converted between the two systems.

Paylocity objects Workday objects How this pairing syncs
Pay Statements Read-only detailed payroll statement data — earnings, deductions, taxes, and direct deposit allocations by year, check date, or date range. Pulled for reporting, never written. Time Off and Absence Balances and requests synced with scheduling and workforce tools. Pay Statements is specific to Paylocity and Time Off and Absence to Workday — each maps to any object or custom field on the other side.
Company Codes Read-only reference codes and descriptions (cost centers, departments, positions) used to validate field mappings on employee writes. Payroll Results Completed pay data exported to finance and benefits systems. Company Codes is specific to Paylocity and Payroll Results to Workday — each maps to any object or custom field on the other side.
Custom Fields Read-only company-specific custom fields returned by category, used to enrich the employee record downstream. Suppliers Workday Financials vendor records aligned with procurement tools. Custom Fields is specific to Paylocity and Suppliers to Workday — each maps to any object or custom field on the other side.
Employees Core HR record keyed by companyId + employeeId; two-way via Create New Employee (POST) and Update Employee (PATCH), plus Get Employee / Get All Employees for reads. Customers and Invoices Financials receivables objects synced for billing visibility where Workday Financials is used. Employees is specific to Paylocity and Customers and Invoices to Workday — each maps to any object or custom field on the other side.
Onboarding Create Employee Onboarding pushes new-hire data into Paylocity's onboarding workflow; Get Onboarding Status reads back partner onboarding progress. Write-in for hires from an ATS. Journal Entries Accounting entries imported from external subledgers into Workday Financials. Onboarding is specific to Paylocity and Journal Entries to Workday — each maps to any object or custom field on the other side.
Deductions (Pay Setup) Recurring deduction codes at the employee level; two-way via Upsert Deduction and Delete, with Get Deduction / Get All Deductions for reads. Custom Reports (RaaS) Tenant-defined reports exposed as web service endpoints, often the practical read surface for syncs. Deductions (Pay Setup) is specific to Paylocity and Custom Reports (RaaS) to Workday — each maps to any object or custom field on the other side.

How changes propagate between Paylocity and Workday

Each direction of the sync is driven by what the source system can signal and what the destination accepts — detection, delivery, and expected latency below.

Paylocity Workday Sub-second propagation

DetectionPaylocity notifies Stacksync of record changes through webhook events. Webhooks — Paylocity POSTs Employee New Hire, Employee Change, Termination, Payroll Processed, and Time Off Approval events to a callback URL.

DeliveryEach detected change is written to Workday through its API, with automatic retries and rate-limit backoff.

Workday Paylocity Interval-based propagation

DetectionStacksync polls Workday for changes on an incremental schedule, reading only records changed since the previous pass. Polling, including transaction-log criteria on SOAP operations to fetch objects changed since a given moment.

DeliveryEach detected change is written to Paylocity through its API, with automatic retries and rate-limit backoff.

Rate-limit considerations

  • Paylocity: 25 requests per second (1,500 per minute); exceeding it returns HTTP 429. Every path is scoped to a Paylocity-assigned companyId (a company code, not a UUID).
What ships with Paylocity ⇄ Workday

Connect Paylocity and Workday for flexible, real-time data sync.

Real-time sync, workflow automation, event queues, EDI, and monitoring, for every Paylocity–Workday connection.

Real-time

Two-way sync

Changes in Paylocity or Workday instantly reflect in both systems. No stale data, no manual imports.

No-code + pro-code

Workflow automation

Trigger automated workflows whenever Paylocity or Workday data changes, update records, fire webhooks, or kick off sequences without brittle API scripts.

At scale

Event queues

Handle millions of events per minute without losing a single Paylocity or Workday record.

Observability

Monitoring

Track your Paylocity ⇄ Workday sync health, view errors, and replay failed events in one click.

Trading partners

EDI

Transform legacy EDI complexity into simple database interactions between Paylocity and Workday.

How the Paylocity and Workday connectors work

Paylocity

Integration surface
REST API (v1 and v2), JSON payloads
Authentication
OAuth 2.0 client credentials via the Paylocity Identity Provider (/IdentityServer/connect/token) with the WebLinkAPI scope; access tokens expire after one hour and API access must be enabled by Paylocity for the company
Change detection
Webhooks — Paylocity POSTs Employee New Hire, Employee Change, Termination, Payroll Processed, and Time Off Approval events to a callback URL; payloads carry only companyId and employeeId, so the receiver calls the relevant API to fetch changed values. Scheduled polling is used for objects without webhooks.
Capabilities
read · write · webhooks
Rate limits
25 requests per second (1,500 per minute); exceeding it returns HTTP 429. Every path is scoped to a Paylocity-assigned companyId (a company code, not a UUID).

Workday

Integration surface
SOAP Workday Web Services (WWS), a REST API, and Reports-as-a-Service (RaaS) endpoints for custom reports
Authentication
OAuth 2.0 for the REST API; integration system users with WS-Security or certificate-based auth for SOAP
Change detection
Polling, including transaction-log criteria on SOAP operations to fetch objects changed since a given moment; no general webhook surface
Capabilities
read · write
How it works

How to connect Paylocity to Workday — three steps, no code

Configure and sync within minutes, no code. Whether you sync 50k or 100M+ records, Stacksync handles the queues, infra, and plumbing. Integrations are non-invasive and need zero setup on your systems.

  1. 01

    Connect your apps

    Authenticate Paylocity and Workday with each platform's native method — OAuth, API keys, or service accounts — plus secure options like SSH tunneling, IP whitelisting, and VPC peering.

    • OAuth 2.0
    • SSH tunnel
    • VPC peering
    Paylocity connected
    Workday connected
    OAuth 2.0
    SSH tunnel
    SSL certificate
    VPC peering
  2. 02

    Choose tables

    Pick the Paylocity and Workday objects to sync — Stacksync auto-detects both schemas, including custom fields where the platform exposes them. Sync to existing tables, or let Stacksync create new ones with ideal data types.

    • Standard objects
    • Custom objects
    • Auto-schema
    objects · Paylocity ⇄ Workday
    Customers 12,480
    Sales Orders 8,213
    Invoices 5,902
    Items 1,344
  3. 03

    Map fields

    Fields map automatically even when names and types differ. Stacksync handles transformation and type casting for you, zero configuration required.

    • Auto-map
    • Type casting
    • Transforms
    Paylocity Workday
    Company company_name text
    Email email text
    Amount amount numeric
    Created created_at timestamp
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FAQ

Paylocity and Workday integration FAQ

SECURITY

Security teams trust Stacksync

As a data company, we understand the importance of keeping your data secure. Stacksync is built with security best practices to keep your data safe at every layer, and is DPF-certified for US, EU, UK and CH data transfers.

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SSO & SCIM

Let your users access Stacksync from your centralized user management systems. Works with Okta, Azure, Google SSO and more.

Alerts

Immediately get alerted about record syncing issues over email, Slack, PagerDuty and WhatsApp. Resolve issues from a centralized dashboard with retry and revert options.

Secure connection options

Securely connects to your systems with:

OAuth 2 SSH Tunnelling SSL certificates IP Whitelisting VPN gateway VPC peering and more

Related integrations

Every pair below is a real-time, two-way sync. Search all 495 integrations available for Paylocity and Workday.

Popular · 8 of 495
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