Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central and Dayforce integration

What moves between them

The main flow runs from Dayforce into Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central. After each pay run, ml-connector pulls the configured Dayforce payroll journal report and posts the earnings, taxes, and deductions into Business Central as journal lines, mapped to the matching GL accounts and dimensions. Employee records flow the same direction so Business Central reflects Dayforce hires, terminations, and rehires. Reference data such as Dayforce org units, jobs, and positions is aligned to Business Central dimensions so every payroll line lands on an account that already exists. Dayforce holds no AP, invoice, or GL account data to receive, so ml-connector does not write financial documents back into Dayforce.

How ml-connector handles it

ml-connector stores both credential sets encrypted, obtains a Dayforce password-grant bearer token and refreshes it before the one-hour expiry, and holds a Microsoft Entra ID client credentials token for the Business Central tenant, targeting the company id on the configured environment name since the environment is part of the URL. Because Dayforce has no GL endpoint, payroll figures are read from the Reports API against a payroll journal report the customer sets up first, then written into Business Central. Because the Business Central chart of accounts and general ledger entries are read-only over the API, each Dayforce labor line is written as a journal line that references an existing GL account and dimension, so org units, jobs, and positions are mapped first. Dayforce is pull-only, so the connector polls on a schedule tied to your payroll calendar, using Dayforce date-range filters to fetch only changed records, and it can renew the three-day Business Central subscriptions before they expire so the employee change feed never goes dark. Dayforce rate limits are tenant-wide and shared across every integration on that environment, so the connector backs off and retries, refreshes the daily Dayforce client-specific service URL, and uses XRefCode as the employee key. Every record carries a full audit trail and can be replayed if a downstream call fails.

A real-world example

A regional senior-living operator with about 700 staff across a dozen facilities runs Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central for finance and Dayforce for HR and payroll. Before the integration, payroll staff exported the journal from Dayforce each pay period and keyed the labor totals into Business Central by hand, then spent the start of month-end close reconciling differences between facility headcount and the labor accounts. With Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central and Dayforce connected, each pay run's journal posts into Business Central automatically, allocated to the dimension for each facility, and employee changes keep both systems aligned. Close starts with labor already reconciled and the manual re-keying step is gone.

What you can do

• •Post Dayforce payroll journal report data into Business Central journals after every pay run, allocated to the correct GL accounts and dimensions.
• •Keep Business Central employee records aligned with Dayforce hires, terminations, and rehires.
• •Map Dayforce org units, jobs, and positions to Business Central dimensions so payroll lands on valid accounts.
• •Bridge the Dayforce one-hour password-grant token and the Business Central Microsoft Entra ID client credentials token.
• •Poll on a schedule tied to your payroll calendar with tenant-wide-rate-limit-aware retries and a full audit trail on every record.

Questions

Which direction does data move between Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central and Dayforce?

The main flow is Dayforce into Business Central. Payroll journal data and employee records move from Dayforce into Business Central, while org units, jobs, and positions are aligned to Business Central dimensions. Dayforce has no AP, invoice, or GL account modules, so ml-connector does not write financial documents back into Dayforce.

How does ml-connector get payroll journal data out of Dayforce?

Dayforce has no GL account or payroll journal REST endpoint, so the data is pulled from the Reports API against a payroll journal report the customer configures inside Dayforce. That report outputs earnings, taxes, and deductions with GL account codes and cost dimensions. ml-connector reads it after each pay run and posts it into Business Central as journal lines that reference existing GL accounts and dimensions.

How does the integration handle authentication if the two systems sign in so differently?

Dayforce uses an OAuth 2.0 password grant with a dedicated web-services user, a fixed client id, and the company namespace, and its bearer token lasts one hour, so ml-connector refreshes it before expiry. Business Central uses an OAuth2 client credentials token through Microsoft Entra ID against the configured environment. ml-connector stores both credential sets encrypted and presents the right token to each system on every call.