Automate Your HR and Payroll Workflow: How the HiBob × Employment Hero Integration Actually Works

If you’re running HiBob for HR and Employment Hero for payroll, there’s a good chance someone on your team spends part of every pay cycle moving data between the two.

A new hire goes into HiBob. Then into Employment Hero. A leave request is approved in HiBob. Then, it was keyed into payroll before Friday. An employee updates their bank details in one system, and someone has to remember to mirror it in the other. The work is tedious, easy to get wrong, and almost always lands on the same person.

We recently ran a webinar walking through how the SyncEzy integration between HiBob and Employment Hero closes that gap. This post is the written version — useful if you’d rather read than watch, or want something you can forward to a colleague.

The problem: two systems that should already agree

When HR and payroll live in separate systems, the friction shows up in predictable places:

• Manual transfers of leave and employee details. Information entered in HR has to be re-keyed into payroll, or vice versa.
• Data drift between systems. Profile details, bank accounts, and super details get out of sync. Reconciling them is a recurring task nobody wants.
• Employees are logging into multiple systems. Staff have to remember which system holds which piece of their record — and where to go to find their pay slip.
• No single source of truth. When two systems disagree, deciding which one is right takes time.

These are the problems we built the integration to solve.

How the integration works

The model is simple: HiBob is the source of truth. Employees and HR enter information into HiBob, and SyncEzy moves the relevant data into Employment Hero for payroll processing. Then, after each pay run, pay slips flow back into HiBob — so the employee experience stays inside one system.

Three flows are worth understanding:

1. Employee data: HiBob → Employment Hero

When a new staff member joins, you create them in HiBob. SyncEzy then creates the same employee in Employment Hero, with all the right fields mapped across. Profile updates — bank details, super details, personal information — follow the same path. You don’t enter staff into payroll manually.

Custom fields are supported. If you’ve created custom fields in HiBob (multiple bank accounts, for example), you create the matching field in Employment Hero, and we pair them during setup.

2. Leave: HiBob → Employment Hero

Leave requests approved in HiBob are sent to Employment Hero for the pay run. Leave balances are displayed in the SyncEzy portal so you can confirm both systems agree before you process pay. No re-keying. No reconciliation on a Thursday afternoon.

3. Pay slips: Employment Hero → HiBob

This is the piece most teams find most valuable. Once a pay run is processed in Employment Hero, pay slips are synced back into HiBob as PDFs. Employees log into HiBob to update their details and to see their pay slips. They never need to log into payroll.

It also means terminations work cleanly: when you off-board someone in HiBob, you can configure SyncEzy to terminate them in Employment Hero automatically. No accidental ghost-payroll for ex-employees.

What you can configure during setup

The integration isn’t a black box. Setup happens on a structured screen-share with a SyncEzy implementation specialist, where you pair the systems together. Things you can dial in:

• Which sites sync? If your Australian operation runs on Employment Hero, say, your Singapore office uses something else, you select only the AU sites. Other parts of the business stay untouched.
• Field pairing. Standard HiBob fields map to standard Employment Hero fields out of the box. Custom fields are paired manually so they sync the way you need.
• Leave categories, rate units, pay categories, pay schedules, and termination reasons. All paired during setup.
• Where pay slips land in HiBob. You can choose a custom folder so they live exactly where your team expects.
• Pay slip filename conventions. Add a prefix so files sort the way you want.
• Termination behaviour. Choose whether ending employment in HiBob terminates the employee in Employment Hero automatically.

The configuration is one-time. Once it’s set, the integration runs in the background.

What admins see day-to-day

Most of the time, the integration is invisible. But there’s a SyncEzy portal that gives administrators a view into everything that’s syncing.

From the portal, you can:

• See every employee and their sync status — fully synced, partially synced, or not synced at all.
• Click into an employee profile to see the HiBob side and the Employment Hero side, line by line.
• See the specific reason a record isn’t syncing (for example, a required field missing in HiBob). Fix it, and the record syncs.
• View leave requests as they come across from HiBob.
• See pay slip PDFs after each pay run.
• Push an individual record through immediately if you don’t want to wait for the next scheduled sync.

If you run multiple businesses, you can have multiple instances of the integration on the same dashboard and manage them from one place.

Security and support

Payroll data is sensitive, and we treat it that way.

SyncEzy is certified to SOC 2 Type II and aligned with the ISO 27001 and IDEA protocols. We invest heavily in the controls that keep employee data private and protected throughout the sync.

Support runs 24 hours a day, five days a week — from the start of business in New Zealand through to the close of business Friday in the US. For payroll, that coverage matters. People need to be paid on time, and a sync issue at 9pm shouldn’t have to wait until morning.

There’s a support chat inside the SyncEzy portal where you can raise a question and, if needed, jump on an online meeting so we can see what you see and fix it together.

What customers say

We work with hundreds of customers on this integration. FinClear is one of them.

Before they implemented the sync, FinClear was running payroll the way most teams in this position do: manually, with separate systems for HR and payroll. Bryan Tan, Finance Manager at FinClear, told us what changed after switching it on:

“Since implementing SyncEzy’s integration, we have experienced notable benefits. Our payroll processes have become more efficient, ensuring accurate and timely calculations. The integration has eliminated the need for manual data entry and improved overall data accuracy and consistency.”

Asked how he’d describe the integration to a friend, Bryan put it this way:

“The HiBob and KeyPay integration by SyncEzy has been a game-changer for us. It streamlines our payroll management, eliminating manual processes and minimising errors. The integration’s value lies in its ability to seamlessly automate and synchronise HR and payroll data.”

— Bryan Tan, Finance Manager, FinClear

(KeyPay was rebranded to Employment Hero Payroll — same product.)

The phrase that always sticks with us is “eliminated the need for manual data entry.” Not reduced. Not sped up. Removed.

What the setup process looks like

The most common question we get after the webinar is some version of: ” How long does this take, and ” How much work is it on our end?

Honestly, less than you’d expect.

Once you decide to move forward, we book a setup session with one of our implementation specialists. On that call, we walk through pairing employees, leave categories, pay categories, pay schedules and termination reasons — together, on a screen-share. We’re not handing you a spreadsheet and asking you to fill it out alone.

Most customers go live in a couple of structured sessions. After that, the integration runs in the background, and the SyncEzy portal is there if you ever need to check on a specific record.

Should you integrate HiBob and Employment Hero?

If you’re nodding along to any of these, the answer is probably yes:

• HR is doing payroll’s data entry, or vice versa.
• You’ve had a pay-run issue caused by data being out of sync.
• Staff are confused about which system to go to for what.
• You want a single source of truth for employee data, and you want HiBob to be it.
• You’d like staff to see their pay slips without logging into payroll.

The integration was built for exactly these problems. And because configuration happens during onboarding, your specific setup — custom fields, multi-site, pay slip naming conventions — gets handled the first time.

Next steps

If you want to see the integration in action with your specific setup, the easiest next step is a short discovery call. You’ll talk to someone who’s implemented this for hundreds of customers, not a generalist sales rep. We’ll cover how the sync would work for your business, what setup looks like, and what it costs — no commitment.

Book a 15-minute discovery call →
If you’d rather poke around first, the SyncEzy knowledge base has the technical details: Visit the knowledge base →

And if you want to watch the original webinar recording, you can find it here: Watch the replay →