FreshBooks and Workday HCM integration

What moves between them

Expenses flow from FreshBooks into Workday. When a FreshBooks webhook signals a new or updated expense, ml-connector maps the expense line items to the corresponding Workday organization and cost center, then creates an entry in Workday's GL to record the cost. Payroll and labor GL journals from Workday flow back into FreshBooks on a daily or weekly schedule, posting the labor costs to FreshBooks journal entries and chart of accounts so the monthly accounting close reflects actual payroll spend. Bills and bill payments from FreshBooks also allocate to Workday cost centers where applicable.

How ml-connector handles it

ml-connector stores FreshBooks OAuth2 credentials and Workday SOAP/REST credentials separately and refreshes tokens on a schedule. It registers a webhook endpoint with FreshBooks and handles incoming HMAC-SHA256 signatures by checking the X-FreshBooks-Hmac-SHA256 header against the computed hash of the request body, rejecting unsigned or tampered payloads. On the Workday side, ml-connector switches between REST for worker and organization queries and SOAP for GL journal writes, since financial data requires the SOAP API. It polls Workday GL journals once per business day to fetch new payroll postings, mapping Workday cost centers and GL accounts to the corresponding FreshBooks categories and accounts. FreshBooks expense webhooks may arrive out of order or with delays of several minutes, so ml-connector deduplicates by expense ID and idempotency key. Workday rate-limit responses (HTTP 429) trigger exponential backoff and retry. Every record carries a transaction ID and audit timestamp so failed postings can be replayed or investigated.

A real-world example

A mid-sized consulting firm uses FreshBooks for expense tracking and accounting, and Workday HCM for payroll across multiple consulting practices. Before the integration, the operations team exported a payroll register from Workday each cycle, then manually coded expenses to FreshBooks by practice and cost center, and at month-end manually verified that payroll costs matched the labor GL accounts. With FreshBooks and Workday HCM connected, consultant expenses tagged by practice in FreshBooks automatically allocate to the matching Workday cost center and organization, and Workday payroll journals post directly into FreshBooks at the end of each pay period. Month-end close is now a matter of verifying that the GL balances match the Workday payroll registers, with no manual re-entry.

What you can do

• •Map FreshBooks expenses to Workday organizations and cost centers via webhook, so labor costs land on the correct GL account.
• •Post Workday payroll and labor GL journals into FreshBooks chart of accounts on a daily or weekly schedule.
• •Authenticate FreshBooks with OAuth2 user delegation and Workday with SOAP/REST credentials, managing token refresh automatically.
• •Deduplicate FreshBooks expenses by ID and handle out-of-order webhooks with full audit trails.
• •Handle Workday rate limits and FreshBooks webhook retries with exponential backoff and idempotency keys.

Questions

What direction does data flow between FreshBooks and Workday HCM?

FreshBooks expenses flow into Workday as cost center allocations, and Workday payroll and labor GL journals flow back into FreshBooks to update the chart of accounts. This two-way flow keeps labor costs aligned between payroll and accounting without manual re-entry.

How does ml-connector handle FreshBooks webhook signatures and delays?

ml-connector validates every webhook by checking the X-FreshBooks-Hmac-SHA256 header against the request body hash, rejecting unsigned or tampered payloads. Webhooks may arrive out of order or with delays of several minutes, so ml-connector deduplicates by expense ID and idempotency key to ensure each cost posts exactly once.

Why does the integration use both SOAP and REST APIs for Workday?

Workday exposes different data through different APIs. REST API covers worker and organization queries, while financial data such as GL journals and cost center hierarchies requires the SOAP API. ml-connector switches between them as needed to fetch and post all required records.