Consolidating Split Payroll Systems Into a Single Resource Calendar
How Top Step Transformed Fragmented Leave Data Into Dependable Availability Data
Every resource manager knows the quiet dread of staffing a week they cannot quite trust. The availability calendar looks complete. But somewhere in the back of their mind is the nagging knowledge that it is not, that the consultant they are about to assign booked vacation weeks ago, and that the vacation lives in a payroll system the project tool has never heard of.
For one professional services organization that Top Step recently worked with, that dread was real. Their workforce was split across two payroll systems: one for employees in the United States, and another for their international staff. Both systems knew exactly who was off and when. However, none of this was known to SuiteProjects Pro.
The Challenge: Two Sources of Truth, Neither Talking to SuiteProjects Pro
The company used Paylocity for its US employees and BambooHR for its international employees. Each system was a reliable system of record for its own population. The problem was that neither one was connected to SuiteProjects Pro, the platform the delivery organization lived in day to day.
So every approved vacation day, sick day, and leave request existed in one place and was needed in another. Someone had to notice the time off, then reflect it in SuiteProjects Pro by hand so that resource managers would not assign work to someone who was already out and so that timesheets would show the correct hours. When that manual step slipped, and manual steps always slip eventually, the result was a double-booked consultant, a timesheet that had to be corrected after the fact, or a plan built against availability that was simply wrong.
In short, the US and international employees followed different systems and different rules, and there was no single, trustworthy place a resource manager could look to answer the most basic planning question of all: who is actually available next week?
The Solution: Two Hourly Integrations, One Consistent Result
Top Step built two scheduled integrations one for each payroll system that runs every hour and brings approved time off into SuiteProjects Pro automatically. One integration handles the US population from Paylocity; the other handles international employees from BambooHR. The systems on the front end are different, but the outcome is deliberately identical: approved time off shows up in SuiteProjects Pro without anyone re-keying it.
Because the scripts run hourly, the availability picture in SuiteProjects Pro is never more than an hour behind the payroll systems. New approvals flow in on their own, and changes to upcoming time off are kept in sync as they happen.
How It Works
Under the hood, each integration takes approved time-off requests from the payroll system and creates the matching records in SuiteProjects Pro, filed against a dedicated out-of-office project so that leave is captured consistently and reported cleanly.
An intentional design choice: Utilizing schedule requests rather than bookings. Instead of entering time off as standard bookings, Top Step opted for schedule requests due to a practical advantage: schedule requests integrate with time types, the specific task codes SuiteProjects Pro employs to classify work and leave. Once approved, these requests seamlessly populate an employee’s timesheet. This key decision ensures a consistent user experience, as approved vacation blocks resource availability and automatically updates timesheets with pre-filled project and task codes, eliminating the need for manual data entry.
Aligning payroll terminology with SuiteProjects Pro. Because different payroll platforms use distinct vocabularies to describe leave, a custom crosswalk provided by the client was used to map each system’s time-off categories to exact SuiteProjects Pro task codes via reference identifiers. This ensures that any approved time off flows directly into SuiteProjects Pro under a precise, relevant code instead of utilizing a generic placeholder.
Intelligent scope management. The sync focuses on essential planning data: recent approvals and updates to time off for the current week and moving forward. By deliberately ignoring retroactive changes to weeks that are already closed, the system ensures future availability remains precise without altering previously reported and reconciled data.
An honest note on integration realities. Integrations are not always a straight line between two systems. The Paylocity feed, for example, is routed through an AWS layer on its way into SuiteProjects Pro: Paylocity to AWS to SuiteProjects Pro. This required some additional configuration and ongoing maintenance to stand up. It is a good reminder that the value of an integration is measured at the endpoints, even when the path between them takes a sensible detour.
Ensuring the Right Projects Reach the Right People
In addition to the primary integration efforts, Top Step introduced a supporting script designed to maintain alignment between project filtersets and assignment groups. This tool ensures that despite evolving teams and shifting responsibilities, users always have visibility into the appropriate projects. Although a minor component compared to the core integration work, this focus on governance and usability plays a vital role in preventing clutter and keeping the integrated system organized over time.
The Result and The Art of the Possible
The company now has one trustworthy view of availability that spans its US and international workforce, drawn automatically from the two systems that actually own that data. Approved time off appears on timesheets on its own, which means less manual re-entry and fewer after-the-fact corrections. And resource managers get to do the thing they were always supposed to do: plan against reality, not against a calendar they had to hope was current.
None of these systems were designed to talk to one another. Paylocity and BambooHR were built to run payroll; SuiteProjects Pro was built to run projects. Left alone, they each did their own job well and left a gap in the middle that people had to fill by hand, every week, forever.
Scripting is what closes that gap. With a pair of targeted, well-designed integrations, the same data that already existed in payroll simply shows up where the business needs it accurately, automatically, and quietly working in the background. That is the art of the possible when you extend SuiteProjects Pro to fit the way your organization actually operates.
This is just one example of a problem thatTop Step helps professional services organizations solve. If you’d like to talk through what’s possible for your organization, we’d welcome the conversation.
