FreshBooks and BambooHR integration

What moves between them

Data moves from BambooHR into FreshBooks. ml-connector reads employees from BambooHR along with their job title, department, and employment status, and creates or updates the matching staff and expense people in FreshBooks so the two systems agree on who is active. Department from BambooHR job information is carried onto FreshBooks expenses so spend can be attributed to the right team. Terminations in BambooHR flag the corresponding FreshBooks records as inactive using the soft-delete pattern rather than a hard delete. Because BambooHR has no vendors, invoices, or GL accounts, ml-connector never writes financial records back into BambooHR.

How ml-connector handles it

ml-connector stores both credential sets encrypted and runs two separate OAuth logins: the BambooHR token endpoint is scoped to the company subdomain, while the FreshBooks token endpoint sits on a shared host but every accounting path is scoped to the account ID it pulls from the FreshBooks identity endpoint after consent. It refreshes each token on its own clock, taking care that FreshBooks rotates its refresh token on every use so the latest one is always saved. BambooHR sends a lightweight webhook when an employee changes, so ml-connector verifies the HMAC-SHA256 signature, then calls the BambooHR employee endpoint and names each field it needs, since BambooHR returns only the ID by default. Employees map to FreshBooks staff and expense people; BambooHR department maps to a tag on FreshBooks expenses. When FreshBooks throttling returns HTTP 429 or BambooHR returns 503, ml-connector backs off and retries, and every record carries a full audit trail and can be replayed if a downstream call fails.

A real-world example

A forty-person digital marketing agency bills clients in FreshBooks and tracks staff expenses there, while running all of its people data in BambooHR. Before the integration, every new hire had to be added by hand in FreshBooks before they could log expenses, departed staff lingered as active expense people for weeks, and expenses were not consistently tied to the team that incurred them. With FreshBooks and BambooHR connected, a new hire in BambooHR becomes a FreshBooks staff and expense person automatically, a termination marks that record inactive, and each expense is tagged with the person's department, so the finance lead can see spend by team without chasing the HR sheet.

What you can do

• •Create and update FreshBooks staff and expense people from BambooHR employees, so the two systems agree on who is active.
• •Carry BambooHR department onto FreshBooks expenses so spend is attributed to the right team.
• •Flag FreshBooks records inactive when BambooHR marks an employee terminated, using the soft-delete pattern.
• •Bridge the BambooHR subdomain OAuth login and the FreshBooks account-scoped OAuth login, refreshing each token on its own schedule.
• •React to BambooHR employee webhooks with signature checks, retries on throttling, and a full audit trail on every record.

Questions

Which direction does data move between FreshBooks and BambooHR?

Data moves one direction, from BambooHR into FreshBooks. Employees, job titles, departments, and employment status flow from BambooHR into FreshBooks staff and expense people. BambooHR has no vendors, invoices, or GL accounts, so ml-connector never writes financial records back into it.

How does the integration keep up with employee changes in BambooHR?

BambooHR sends a lightweight webhook when an employee is created, updated, or deleted, carrying the employee ID and the list of changed fields. ml-connector verifies the HMAC-SHA256 signature on that webhook, then calls the BambooHR employee endpoint to fetch the current values, naming each field it needs because BambooHR returns only the ID by default. It then updates the matching FreshBooks staff and expense person.

Why does this connection only send data one way?

BambooHR is an HRIS, not a finance system, so it has no vendors, invoices, payments, or GL accounts to receive. The useful data lives in BambooHR as people records, and the matching consumers in FreshBooks are its staff and expense people. ml-connector therefore reads from BambooHR and writes into FreshBooks, and never pushes financial records back.