When HR and Project Management Finally Speak the Same Language
How a Dayforce-to-SuiteProjects Pro Integration Closed the Loop on Employee Data, Leave Accruals, and Expense Reimbursement
In most professional services organizations, HR and project management live in separate worlds. HR knows who your employees are, what they earn, what leave they have accrued, and what their job codes mean. Project management knows who is assigned to what, how many hours have been logged, and what gets billed. The two worlds have to reconcile eventually, usually at payroll time, or when someone submits an expense report, but getting them to actually talk to each other in real time is another matter entirely.
For one of our clients, that gap was not just an inconvenience. It was a source of ongoing manual work that touched HR coordinators, billing agents, project managers, and finance,every time an employee was hired, every time a leave balance changed, every time someone logged banked time or submitted a reimbursable expense.
They were using Dayforce for HR and payroll, and SuiteProjects Pro (SPP) for project management and billing. The two systems had no connection. Every piece of data that needed to live in both places had to be entered twice. And any discrepancy between them, a leave balance that did not match, a job code that had not been updated, an expense that was coded to the wrong account, created reconciliation work that fell to people who already had full plates.
Top Step built an integration that changed that. Here is how it works, and why the design choices matter as much as the technical execution.
The Challenge: Two Systems, One Employee
The client’s requirements came in two directions. They needed data to flow from Dayforce into SuiteProjects Pro, and they needed data to flow back out. Neither direction was simple.
From Dayforce, SPP needed to receive new and updated employee records including name, email, role, department, job code, and loaded cost so that project management and resource planning in SPP would always reflect current HR data. It also needed to receive leave accrual balances: vacation, sick time, and banked hours. Without that data in SPP, project managers had no visibility into how much leave a team member had available, and timesheets could not accurately reflect the difference between time worked, time off taken, and time banked.
From SPP, Dayforce needed to receive approved time entries. Specifically, the payroll team needed to know, for each employee and each day, how hours were categorized: regular project work, banked time drawn down, sick time used, vacation taken, statutory holidays, and special leave. Getting that summary right in the format Dayforce expected required translating SPP’s time entry structure into a set of rules that Dayforce could interpret correctly for payroll processing.
And separately, approved expense receipts entered in SPP needed to flow into Dayforce for reimbursement processing, with the correct expense category codes and amounts mapped to the right payroll adjustment records.
The integration runs hourly. An employee record updated in Dayforce in the morning is reflected in SuiteProjects Pro before lunch. A leave balance posted overnight is visible to project managers before the workday begins.
Bringing Employees Into SuiteProjects Pro
The import side of the integration starts with employee records in Dayforce. When a new employee is added, or an existing employee’s record is updated, the integration creates or updates the corresponding user in SuiteProjects Pro.
More than just name and email flows across. Job codes, which in this client’s environment are determined by combining an employee’s position title with their years of experience, are mapped to the correct SPP equivalent and stamped on the user record. Department and manager relationships are set. A loaded cost value, used for project profitability calculations in SPP, is pulled from Dayforce and populated on the user record. When a loaded cost changes, the previous value is end-dated and the new value is set as current, preserving historical cost data rather than simply overwriting it.
When a new user is created, the integration also sets a standard collection of default preferences: timesheet requirements, mobile approval settings, filterset assignments, and display options. These are the settings that would otherwise require someone to manually configure each new user account, a small but persistent source of onboarding friction that simply disappears when the integration handles it automatically.
Leave Accruals: Visibility Where It Matters
The more operationally significant data flowing from Dayforce to SPP is leave accrual balances. Each night, the integration reads the current vacation, sick, and banked hour balances for each employee from Dayforce and updates corresponding custom fields on the SPP user record.
This matters because project managers working in SPP have no native visibility into how much leave an employee has available. Without it, time-off approvals and resource planning happen against an incomplete picture. The integration gives project managers that visibility without requiring them to log into Dayforce or ask HR, the data is simply there, on the user record, current as of that morning.
Exporting Time Back to Payroll
The export side of the integration is where the business logic gets more intricate. SPP captures time entries with reference codes that indicate the nature of the time worked: regular project hours, vacation used, sick time, banked time accrued, banked time drawn down, statutory holidays, and special leave categories. Dayforce, for payroll purposes, needs that same information organized differently summarized by day and employee, with each category of time mapped to a specific payroll code.
The integration handles this translation automatically. At the end of each week, it sums the time entries by category per employee per day, resolves the banking logic (distinguishing between time being banked and time being drawn down from a bank), and sends the result to Dayforce in the expected format. Statutory holidays and special leave types are handled separately to ensure correct presentation on paystubs.
The payroll team stops receiving a raw export and starts receiving a clean, categorized summary. The reconciliation work that used to happen after the fact now happens inside the integration, before anything reaches Dayforce.
An edge case worth noting: banked time has a netting logic built in. If an employee both accrues banked time and draws it down within the same week, the integration calculates the net position at end of week and sends a single consolidated entry rather than two offsetting lines. This prevents unnecessary noise in Dayforce and ensures the payroll calculation reflects the employee’s actual position.
Expenses: Closing the Reimbursement Loop
The final piece of the integration addresses expense reimbursement. When employees submit reimbursable expenses in SPP and those receipts are approved, the integration identifies them and sends the relevant data to Dayforce for processing.
Each expense line is mapped to a Dayforce pay adjustment code based on the expense category, mileage reimbursements follow a different code than general expense reimbursements, for example. The employee identifier, reimbursement amount, and applicable codes are passed to Dayforce, where they are processed as part of the next payroll run. Mileage receipts have an additional layer: the integration calculates the reimbursement amount from the rate stored on the Expense Category record and the quantity entered on the receipt, rather than relying on whatever amount the employee might have entered manually.
Only expense receipts with a populated reimbursable amount field are exported, the integration filters out non-reimbursable lines automatically, so Dayforce receives a clean, relevant set of records rather than a full dump of every expense line in the system.
What the Integration Actually Solves
It is worth stepping back from the mechanics to discuss what changed for this client.
HR coordinators no longer manually recreate employee data in SuiteProjects Pro when someone is hired or changes roles. The data flows across automatically, including the configuration details that would otherwise require a support ticket.
Project managers have leave balance data available in the tool they already use for resource planning, without needing to contact HR or check a separate system.
The payroll team receives a structured, pre-reconciled time summary rather than raw SPP export data that requires interpretation and manual adjustment before it can be used.
Finance can trace expense reimbursements from the receipt in SPP to the payroll adjustment in Dayforce without a manual handoff in between.
None of these outcomes required anyone to change how they fundamentally work. The integration sits between the two systems, translates between their respective data models, and keeps them synchronized. The people on either side continue using the tools they know.
The best integrations are invisible to the people who benefit from them. They just notice that the data is right, the reconciliation work is gone, and nobody is asking them to enter the same information twice.
Is Your HR System Talking to Your PSA?
If your organization runs a dedicated HR or payroll platform alongside SuiteProjects Pro, there is a good chance data is moving between them manually or not moving at all, and someone is compensating for the gap. Leave balances, loaded costs, job codes, expense reimbursements: these are all data points that live in both systems and need to stay aligned.
The Dayforce integration described here was built to match this client’s specific data model, business rules, and payroll logic. The same approach, scheduled, rules-driven synchronization between your HR platform and SPP can be designed for other systems. If you are spending time bridging that gap manually, it is worth a conversation about what automation could do instead.
Contact Top Step to discuss how SuiteProjects Pro integrations can connect your HR and project management systems.
