Sage Intacct and Dayforce integration

What moves between them

Employee records, job assignments, and organizational unit hierarchies flow from Dayforce into Sage Intacct. Dayforce cost allocations and organization structures map to Sage Intacct GL dimensions and cost centers. The poll runs on a schedule aligned to your payroll cycle, typically after each pay period closes in Dayforce. Payroll headcount and job codes are read from Dayforce and written to corresponding employee and dimension records in Sage Intacct. Reference data such as organization units and job titles are synced bidirectionally so Dayforce structure changes reflect in Sage Intacct cost dimension validation. GL accounts themselves remain read-only from Sage Intacct; the integration maps and allocates to existing accounts rather than creating new ones.

How ml-connector handles it

ml-connector stores both Sage Intacct and Dayforce credentials encrypted. On startup it calls Dayforce's token endpoint, receives a Bearer JWT with a one-hour expiry, and schedules a refresh 5 minutes before expiry to avoid outages. For Sage Intacct it performs an initial getAPISession call using the XML gateway, caches the sessionid for the full 50-minute lifetime, and automatically refreshes on the next poll cycle if the session expires. It then polls Dayforce for employee and organization unit records changed since the last sync window using filterUpdateDateRangeMin and filterUpdateDateRangeMax, parses the REST JSON responses, and formats them as XML for Sage Intacct. Before writing to Sage Intacct it validates that all GL dimensions and cost centers referenced in the Dayforce payload already exist in Sage Intacct; if a cost center is missing it stages the record for retry and alerts the operations team. Forbidden XML control characters are stripped before escaping. Both systems are pull-only, so ml-connector never relies on webhooks; if a poll cycle is missed the next cycle catches up by using a wider time window. Failed writes are retried with exponential backoff, and every employee, job, and dimension sync carries a full audit trail keyed by Dayforce employee ID.

A real-world example

A mid-sized professional services firm runs Dayforce for payroll across five offices and Sage Intacct for accounting and financial consolidation. The operations team manually exported employee rosters from Dayforce every pay period and re-entered them into Sage Intacct to update headcount and cost allocation dimensions. Month-end close required days of reconciliation between Dayforce payroll registers and Sage Intacct headcount and GL account allocations. After Dayforce and Sage Intacct are connected, employee changes, job transitions, and organization moves flow automatically into Sage Intacct on the payroll schedule. Headcount and cost allocations are always in sync, eliminating the manual export and re-entry step. The finance team can close the books knowing Sage Intacct reflects the current payroll structure without downstream errors.

What you can do

• •Sync employee records and job assignments from Dayforce to Sage Intacct, keeping headcount and payroll roles aligned.
• •Map Dayforce organization units and cost allocations to Sage Intacct GL dimensions and cost centers.
• •Manage Sage Intacct XML gateway session tokens and Dayforce OAuth tokens with automatic refresh before expiry.
• •Poll both systems on a payroll-aligned schedule and retry failed writes with full audit trail and error replay.
• •Validate that all cost centers and GL accounts exist in Sage Intacct before syncing employee allocations.

Questions

Which direction does data move between Sage Intacct and Dayforce?

Employee records, jobs, and organization structure flow primarily from Dayforce into Sage Intacct to keep headcount and cost allocations synchronized. Reference data such as organization units and job titles are synced to maintain valid dimensions in Sage Intacct. GL accounts and financial records remain in Sage Intacct and are not written back to Dayforce.

How does ml-connector handle the different authentication methods?

ml-connector stores both credential sets encrypted. For Dayforce it performs an OAuth 2.0 ROPC token exchange, receives a Bearer JWT with a 3600-second lifetime, and schedules a refresh 5 minutes before expiry. For Sage Intacct it calls the XML gateway getAPISession endpoint, caches the sessionid for 50 minutes, and refreshes on the next poll if the session expires.

What happens if a cost center exists in Dayforce but not in Sage Intacct?

ml-connector validates all GL dimensions and cost centers in Dayforce against existing Sage Intacct accounts before writing. If a cost center is missing it stages the record for retry and alerts the operations team so the account can be created in Sage Intacct. The sync will retry the employee record on the next poll cycle.