Overview
A core component of ClearCompany's ADP Bi-Directional Connector is the ability to set ADP as your system of record, populating and keeping foundational data aligned between both systems. Once you've completed this setup, ClearCompany will run an hourly automated sync to ensure that your data remains up to date at all times.
The following data will be managed and maintained within ADP, meaning that any update you make within ADP will remain in sync with ClearCompany.
In this article:
What to know Before Starting with System of Record
System of Record Set Up
What to Know After System of Record is Complete
Troubleshooting and FAQs
Additional Resources
In order to set up System of Record in your organization, you will be presented with a Setup Wizard or Alignment Wizard in ClearCompany to help walk you through the process. In this guide, we talk about the Legacy Version of the setup wizard, if you would like to use the ADP Express Setup Wizard go to this article. (Will Link once it is published)
What to Know Before Starting with System of Record
This process is best done in one sitting if possible and could take up to several hours depending on how many records need to be synced and how many edits you are going to make to the information synced. We recommend completing the setup once you begin, but you will have the ability to save and return to where you left off if needed.
Things you will need before starting:
- An understanding of your organization’s ADP configuration, or input from someone with such an understanding.
- An understanding of your employees and organizational structure, or input from someone with such an understanding.
- Access to your organization’s ADP administrator account.
- Ensuring that your ADP data like Locations, Home Departments, and Job Titles are up to date and configured as desired
Additional Details to Know
- If you have multiple company codes within ADP, you can choose to exclude departments and employees based on their company code.
- All active employees within ADP will sync to ClearCompany as users (unless excluded by company code as noted above). This is particularly useful if your organization utilizes ClearCompany's performance module. If your organization does not use ClearCompany's performance module, it is still helpful to sync all employees to ClearCompany in order to properly populate your organization chart as well as reports found within ClearCompany.
- Please note, user records created within ClearCompany do not receive any automatic communication that they have been added, and (unless otherwise specified as noted in the setup instructions below) are not automatically assigned any access permissions in ClearCompany.
System of Record Setup
If you were not an existing ClearCompany client prior to purchasing the ADP connector for ClearCompany, you will be presented with the Setup Wizard when you are ready to tackle the System of Record. The Setup Wizard will guide you through creating Offices, Departments, Roles, and Employees based off of your data within your ADP instance. The key difference between the Setup Wizard and the Alignment Wizard is that since you do not have any data within ClearCompany to match, your ClearCompany data will be created from your data within ADP.
For an overview of the Setup Wizard, please watch the video below.
Setup Wizard Steps
To begin with, the Setup Wizard, log in to ClearCompany as an administrator. Navigate to Tools -> Setup -> ADP Integration Management. You will be presented with the following page:
Click Begin Setup Now. The next page will give you Sync Settings. Here, you can exclude Departments and Employees by Company Codes (also known as Payroll Group Codes). This will help speed up the wizard if you know there are certain Company codes you wish to keep excluded from ClearCompany.
Next, click begin setup at the bottom of the screen to go through the Offices, Departments, Roles, and Employees that will be brought in from ADP to ClearCompany.
Offices, Departments, and Roles
On each page for Offices, Departments, and Roles, you will be shown the ADP data that will create a corresponding entity within ClearCompany. Please be sure to read the instructions at the top of the page.
You have the option on each screen to exclude entities in the following three ways:
- Choose to not sync that entity type entirely
- To do this, click Options -> Do NOT use ADP as the System of Record for {Entity type}
- If you change your mind, this can be undone during the System of Record setup (but not once it is complete) by choosing "I Do want to use ADP as the System of Record for {Entity type}" in the Options menu
- To do this, click Options -> Do NOT use ADP as the System of Record for {Entity type}
- Exclude All initially (any new entity in ADP will still be created in ClearCompany moving forward)
- To do this, select the Exclude All button towards the upper lefthand corner
- To do this, select the Exclude All button towards the upper lefthand corner
- Exclude individual entities
- To do this, click the x mark next to each individual entity
- To do this, click the x mark next to each individual entity
While you are walking through the wizard, if you make any changes to your ADP data that you would like to see reflected in the wizard, click Options -> Refresh Data - I made changes in ADP
Each entity 'pill' on these pages also shows you the count of how many employees are currently associated with that entity. For instance, in the screenshot below we can see that 14 employees are currently assigned to the Advertising Job Title.
Once you've configured all offices, departments, or roles on each page, click the blue 'Proceed with these {Entity type}' button at the bottom of the page to be taken through to the next screen. You can also go back to previous screens at any time, or choose to save your progress by selecting "Finish Later".
Employees
The employee screen functions differently than the previous three pages. Those differences are:
- At this stage, you cannot exclude any employees. That can only be done by Company Code at the beginning of the Setup Wizard
- As described in the page instructions, you will be given a list of any employee that is not currently assigned one of the following foundational data points:
-
- Role (ie Job Title)
- Department
- Office (ie Location)
- For data quality within your ClearCompany account, such as within performance reviews and reporting, it is advised that you fill out any missing data here. However, if you choose not to you can proceed, and default values will be assigned for any missing data point. This information can also be updated directly in your ADP account and will be reflected upon the next sync of data
- You can use the table as shown below to fill out the missing data
-
- From the Options dropdown, you can also choose to add permissions for all employees that get created in ClearCompany. The available permissions to add are Performance Management and Goal Alignment, which are needed to be included in performance reviews and to add goals, respectively.
- Please Note: Due to current functionality limitations, only ClearCompany user accounts which are created directly from ADP will be assigned permissions. This means if you utilize ClearCompany onboarding, any candidate that you onboard and then send to ADP via the new hire data transfer will not be assigned the permissions. Our team is currently looking into this, but we do not yet have a timeframe on when that functionality will be updated.
Finalizing Setup
Once you've ensured all of the data that will be created in ClearCompany is accurate, click Enable on the final screen to finalize the wizard.
At this point, the two systems will begin the process of initially syncing data, which could take up to several hours depending on the amount of data in your ADP instance. You can continue checking on the status by navigating to Tools -> Setup -> ADP Integration Management within ClearCompany.
If you had an existing ClearCompany account prior to purchasing the ADP connector, then you will be presented with the Alignment Wizard when you are ready to complete the System of Record. Utilizing the Alignment Wizard allows you to match your ADP data with existing ClearCompany data. If there is no match between the two systems, you have the option to create a new data point in ClearCompany based on what is available from ADP. For example, if you have a department in your ADP instance that does not have a match within ClearCompany, then you have the option to create a new Department in ClearCompany with the same name as what you have in ADP. Moving forward, any new hires that are hired into this Department will have that data point sync over to ADP.
For an overview of the Alignment Wizard, please watch the video below.
Alignment Wizard Steps
To begin with, the Alignment Wizard, log in to ClearCompany as an administrator. Navigate to Tools -> Setup -> ADP Integration Management. You will be presented with the following page:
Click Begin Setup Now. The next page will give you Sync Settings. Here, you can exclude Departments and Employees by Company Codes (also known as Payroll Group Codes). This will help speed up the wizard if you know there are certain Company codes you wish to keep excluded from ClearCompany.
Next, click begin setup at the bottom of the screen to go through Offices, Departments, Roles, and Employees that will be either aligned with existing ClearCompany data or created from ADP.
Offices, Departments, and Roles
On each page for Offices, Departments, and Roles, you will be shown the ADP data that will create a corresponding entity within ClearCompany, along with entities that were automatically aligned. Please be sure to read the instructions at the top of the page.
New Entities/ Manually Aligning
The first list of entities on each page will be the location, departments, or job titles in ADP which were not automatically aligned to an existing ClearCompany office, department, or role.
On the left will be your data from ADP. The blue arrow will link to the entity in ClearCompany. As seen in the image below, there is a blue 'New' tab next to the data for ClearCompany. This is indicating that a new entity will be created in ClearCompany.
If you go all the way to the right of the page, you will see an options dropdown. For each data point, you can select to either not create this entity, or let the system know you already have an entity in ClearCompany that you'd like to match the value from ADP on. If you select that you already have an entity in ClearCompany to match, you will be brought to the following screen to find and confirm the entity in ClearCompany:
Automatically Aligned Entities
The bottom of each screen will show you which ADP and ClearCompany entities were automatically aligned based on matching names
You also have an "options" choice here to either make that a new entity within ClearCompany, or to align to a different ClearCompany value
Additional Details
While you are walking through the wizard, if you make any changes to your ADP data that you would like to see reflected in the wizard, click Options -> Refresh Data - I made changes in ADP
Each entity 'pill' on these pages also shows you the count of how many employees are currently associated with that entity. For instance, in the screenshot below we can see that 14 employees are currently assigned to the Advertising Specialist Job Title within ADP.
Once you've configured all offices, departments, or roles on each page, click the blue 'Proceed with these {Entity type}' button at the bottom of the page to be taken through to the next screen. You can also go back to previous screens at any time, or choose to save your progress by selecting "Finish Later".
Employees
There are two additional screens related to employee data. The first works the same as the previous office, department, and role screens, asking you to align or create new employees.
The second employee screen titled "Provide Missing Employee Data" functions differently than the previous four pages. Those differences are:
- At this stage, you cannot exclude any employees. That can only be done by Company Code at the beginning of the Setup Wizard
- As described in the page instructions, you will be given a list of any employee that is not currently assigned one of the following foundational data points:
-
- Role (ie Job Title)
- Department
- Office (ie Location)
- For data quality within your ClearCompany account, such as within performance reviews and reporting, it is advised that you fill out any missing data here. However, if you choose not to you can proceed, and default values will be assigned for any missing data point. This information can also be updated directly in your ADP account and will be reflected upon the next sync of data
- You can use the table as shown below to fill out missing data
-
- From the Options dropdown, you can also choose to add permissions for all employees that get created in ClearCompany. The available permissions to add are Performance Management and Goal Alignment, which are needed to be included in performance reviews and to add goals, respectively. These permissions will not be added to existing ClearCompany user accounts which get aligned with ADP data.
- Please Note: Due to current functionality limitations, only ClearCompany user accounts which are created directly from ADP will be assigned permissions. This means if you utilize ClearCompany onboarding, any candidate that you onboard and then send to ADP via the new hire data transfer will not be assigned the permissions. Our team is currently looking into this, but we do not yet have a timeframe on when that functionality will be updated
Finalizing Setup
Once you've ensured all of the data that will be created in ClearCompany is accurate, click Enable on the final screen to finalize the wizard.
At this point, the two systems will begin the process of initially syncing/aligning data, which could take up to several hours depending on the amount of data in your ADP instance. You can continue checking on the status by navigating to Tools -> Setup -> ADP Integration Management within ClearCompany.
What to Know After System of Record is Complete
Once you have finalized your System of Record setup, your account is now actively synced to ADP! You can now work with your primary ClearCompany contact (which should be an Implementation Manager for new clients or Customer Success Manager for existing clients) to have ClearCompany support proceed with the New Hire transfer integration setup.
Additionally, you can view your System of Record status and manage some limited settings moving forward from Tools -> Setup -> ADP Integration Management. See below for information on that menu.
The Sync Status tab on the ADP Integration Management menu provides information on when the last data sync was run between ADP and ClearCompany.
An automated sync will run every hour between the two systems, which will pull over any new updates to your aligned ADP offices, departments, roles, or employees, as well as create any new entities in ClearCompany which were created in ADP.
If you made a change in ADP that you would like to see reflected right away, you can click the "Pull Updates Now" button to run a manual sync. This can be done at any time.
This screen gives you a snapshot of how your System of Record was configured. If you chose to fully exclude any entity type, the arrows in the screenshot below would instead be colored red.
Image
Using the ADP Include/Exclude features, you can select to Change/Update any of the Data Points available.
Troubleshooting and FAQs
Confirm that you have consented to both the ClearCompany Enhancement and the ClearCompany End User in ADP. You should have seen these consents when you first logged into ClearCompany from ADP.
If you did not, the ADP user who purchased the app can go to this link: https://adpapps.adp.com/consent-manager/
Once you have consented to both of the policies, follow these steps:
- Log out of ClearCompany & ADP
- Log back into ADP, and then ClearCompany
- Click on the "Get Started" button to setup the System of Record
- If the error still appears, click "Try Again" in the banner in the top right - Note: this can take several minutes to load, especially for larger organizations.
- If the error still appears, please reach out to support@clearcompany.com for additional assistance
ClearCompany has two fields for employee names: Legal Name and Preferred Name. When we first create a user record from ADP, both fields will populate with the ADP legal name.
However, moving forward we will only update the legal name on our side, but not the preferred name. The reason for this, for example, is that if Robert's preferred name is Bob, we would not want to change that back to Robert on every sync.
To make this change, navigate in ClearCompany to Tools -> Setup -> Users -> View Profile, and make the update to the Chosen/Preferred Name field.
Our automated syncs first compares your ADP data to the existing data in ClearCompany, then if any changes are needed, we will only update the user records where changes were made.
However, the manual sync skips that comparison step and attempts to update every user record within ClearCompany, regardless of whether a change was made in ADP or not.
Regardless of the sync method, the changes will be made, but the number on this screen reflects the number of users we attempted an update for.
Additional Resources
ADP Bi-Directional: Setting up ADP as Your System of Record
ADP Include/Exclude
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