Migrate from Alongside to BambooHR

Alongside Employee records map 1:1 to BambooHR Employee. The first step is API inspection or customer-provided schema to identify Alongside's field names for first name, last name, work email, hire date, department, location, and job title. We split combined name fields into BambooHR's separate firstName and lastName fields. hireDate maps to BambooHR's date fields; employmentHistoryStatus maps to BambooHR's employmentHistoryStatus picklist (active, inactive, terminated). Work email is the dedupe key during import.

Alongside Company records (if present as a distinct object) map to BambooHR Company. We resolve whether Alongside uses a flat employee record or a separate company-level record by inspecting the API response shape during discovery. Company name and address fields map to BambooHR's Company object fields. If Alongside embeds company data inside the employee record, we extract and normalize it into a standalone BambooHR Company import.

Alongside manager relationships (stored as a managerId reference or a manager name field on the Employee record) map to BambooHR's supervisorEmployeeNumber or managerId field on Employee. We resolve by matching the manager's email or employee ID against the Employee import batch. If the manager record has not yet been imported, we use a two-pass import: first pass imports all employees as inactive placeholders, second pass updates managerId references after all Employee IDs are known.

Alongside employment status values (active, on-leave, terminated) map to BambooHR's employmentHistoryStatus picklist. Terminated employees retain their termination date and final employment status in BambooHR rather than being hard-deleted, preserving audit history for compliance purposes.

Alongside time-off balances (accrued days by type: vacation, sick, personal) migrate to BambooHR Time-Off Requests as historical approved entries. We determine the accrual balance from Alongside's balance field and create corresponding BambooHR time-off records with a status of approved and the balance date as the request date. BambooHR time-off policies (PTO, sick, custom) must be configured in the destination account before import, as the policy name on the BambooHR import row must match an existing policy.

Any Alongside custom fields on the Employee record (such as cost center, work location, employee type, security clearance, or project assignment) require pre-creation as custom fields in BambooHR before import. We create the BambooHR custom field with the appropriate type (dropdown, text, date, or checkbox) matching the Alongside field's data type, then map the values during the import transform. This is a configuration step that occurs before the first data load.

Alongside department values migrate to BambooHR's department field on Employee. If Alongside stores department as a free-text field with inconsistent values, we normalize during the transform pass using a value-map defined by the customer during scoping, then import the normalized values into BambooHR's department dropdown.

Alongside location or office field maps to BambooHR's location field on Employee. BambooHR's location field is a dropdown; if Alongside uses free-text locations, we apply the same normalization pass as department before import.

Alongside job title maps directly to BambooHR's jobTitle field on Employee. Job title is a free-text field in BambooHR, so no normalization is required unless the customer specifies a preferred title convention.

Employee documents (offer letters, contracts, performance reviews) stored as file attachments in Alongside migrate to BambooHR as Employee FileAttachments. We extract the binary file and the employee record it belongs to, then upload via BambooHR's file attachment endpoint tied to the corresponding Employee record. The original filename and MIME type are preserved. File attachments without a resolvable employee record are flagged in a reconciliation report for manual resolution.

Alongside onboarding task checklists and new hire status records do not have a direct BambooHR analog that accepts imported historical data. We export the onboarding task status and completion dates as a written inventory document. BambooHR's native onboarding checklists (Pro and above) are configured by the customer's admin post-migration using this inventory as the reference checklist. We do not programmatically create onboarding tasks inside BambooHR's workflow engine.