When Scott Walker, an Engineering Manager at Bonusly—a peer-to-peer recognition platform—was brought into the company, he was tasked with building a team that’d scale and maintain HRIS integrations with their product.

The company had already implemented a patchwork of HRIS integrations in-house via APIs, files (i.e., SFTP), and SCIM, but Scott found the process of building and maintaining these integrations extremely cumbersome. They had to deal with countless support issues, bugs, backwards incompatible API changes, customer-specific syncing requests, and more.

In addition, his sales team was constantly asked whether their platform integrated with various HRIS platforms. Scott knew they needed to address each of these asks to win new business, but doing so would be extremely time and resource intensive for his team.

As they began to explore 3rd-party solutions, they ended up comparing Merge with embedded iPaaS solutions and found that Merge’s approach was significantly better. 

According to Scott, “Embedded iPaaS solutions require extensive customizations and force you to build one integration at a time, which isn’t scalable. With Merge, we can build once and access dozens of customizable HRIS integrations that are ready out-of-the-box.”

When Scott and his team found that Merge also provided better support and documentation, their choice of who to partner with became all the more easy.

The team at Bonusly has added more than 25 HRIS integrations via Merge within a few weeks, including HiBob, Gusto, TriNet, and Sage.

Through these integrations, they can sync a wide range of fields—from employee ID to start date to employment type—and power the following automated provisioning flows for customers:

• Once an HR professional signs up for a Bonusly account, they can connect their HRIS via Merge Link, which would immediately add employees to their Bonusly account

• Any time an employee is modified in the HRIS, the corresponding change(s) takes place in the associated employee’s Bonusly profile

• Once an employee is marked as terminated in the HRIS, the de-provisioning flow for that employee kickstarts in Bonusly

In addition, since Bonusly can sync a broad number of fields, they can help customers set up a number of customizable in-product workflows with ease. Here are just a few examples:

• Once a key employee event takes place—whether it’s a birthday, a work anniversary, or a promotion—the employee can receive a specific number of points and message in Bonusly

• Based on an employee’s role, department, length of tenure, and any other fields, an employee could receive a certain point allowance 

• If an employee is in a certain department, they may be able to give department-specific gifts

Scott and his team no longer have to exclusively worry about building and maintaining HRIS integrations, allowing their team to focus on Bonusly’s core product instead. 

In addition, their engineering team has been able to save hundreds of hours and take integrations live significantly faster.

“I don’t think we would have been able to build 20+ HRIS integrations over my 3 year tenure at Bonusly if we weren’t using Merge,” says Scott. “It’s safe to say that Merge has accelerated our pace of building integrations by at least 20x.”

Scott and his team have also found Merge’s Integration Observability tooling to be invaluable in detecting, diagnosing, and troubleshooting issues.

Scott explains further: “Through Merge’s API logs and automated issue alerts, our team can easily pinpoint issues on behalf of customers and identify their solutions, which we can pass along to the affected customers. In the future, we plan on making these alerts available in our product so that our customer success team and customers can discover and take action on them immediately.”

Finally, Merge’s integrations have helped Bonusly deliver more value to customers.

“Merge’s integrations offer more comprehensive syncs than our other integrations, and this lets our customers unlock additional value from our platform. Just to use an example, Merge allows us to sync employee hierarchical information. This enables customers to automatically provision employees with the specific features they need in Bonusly from the get-go,” explains Scott.

So, what’s next in Bonusly’s journey with Merge? 

According to Scott: “We’re planning on adding additional integrations that our prospects have been asking for, such as Microsoft Entra ID (formerly Azure Active Directory). We’re confident that these additional integrations will help us close even more deals and allow us to retain even more customers.”