Migrate from Rival to BambooHR

Core employee fields (first name, last name, hire date, job title, department, work location, employment status) map to BambooHR Employee fields. Rival's custom fields are discovered during scoping by coordinating with the customer's Rival administrator; each field is then type-mapped to a BambooHR Employee field (text, date, dropdown, checkbox) before any records write. The mapping table is built per-migration because Rival allows organizations to define arbitrary custom fields with no public schema registry.

Rival stores department assignments as a related field on employee records. We extract the distinct department names during export, create corresponding Department records in BambooHR, then re-attach employees to the correct department during the employee write phase using BambooHR's departmentId field. If Rival exposes a department hierarchy (sub-departments), we build a parent-child structure in BambooHR's Department module.

Rival's manager relationships (reporting lines) are stored as a related set. We extract the manager reference per employee from the export and resolve it to the manager's Employee record in BambooHR by matching on name or email. The managerId on the BambooHR Employee record establishes the reporting line for the org chart and approval routing. Circular references are flagged during reconciliation and escalated to the customer's HR admin.

Rival stores salary and compensation records with effective dates. We preserve the effective_date sequence from Rival and map each row to BambooHR's Compensation Management module, which is available on the Elite plan. Each effective-date row writes as a separate Compensation record with pay group, pay rate, pay frequency, and change reason. If the customer does not license Elite, we write the most recent compensation as a custom field on the Employee record and document the effective-date sequence for manual entry.

Rival stores PTO as current-state balance values. We extract the balance snapshot at migration time and write it as an opening balance on BambooHR's Time Off Management for each employee. Accrual policies and ongoing balances continue in BambooHR post-migration; we set a migration-date marker so the customer's HR admin can validate that accrual resets are not double-counted. If Rival exposes accrual rate and carryover data, we include those in the opening balance write.

Benefits data (plan names, coverage tiers, enrollment dates, carrier names) migrates as structured records per employee. Carrier-specific enrollment IDs may not map 1:1 across platforms; we write the plan name and tier as text fields and flag carrier-specific IDs in the reconciliation report for the HR admin to re-enter manually. Benefits carriers and plan IDs are not verified against BambooHR's benefit module schema unless the customer licenses BambooHR's native Benefits module.

Job titles are standard flat fields in Rival and map directly to BambooHR's jobTitle field on the Employee record. No transformation required. Job titles do not require a separate lookup table.

Rival stores location data (office addresses, remote designations) as a flat field on employee records. We map these to BambooHR's location field, creating Location records in BambooHR's Locations module if the address data includes structured city/state/zip components. Remote designations transfer as a text value in the location field.

Rival custom fields are customer-defined and vary by organization. During scoping, we coordinate with the customer's Rival administrator to extract the live field schema, then create matching custom fields in BambooHR before any data writes. Field types are mapped: text to Text, dates to Date, checkboxes to Checkbox, and picklist-like fields to Dropdown. Fields that do not exist in BambooHR's standard schema are created as BambooHR custom fields in the Employee module settings first.

Rival's user and role model (admin, manager, employee role types) maps to BambooHR user accounts. Role names and permission sets differ across platforms; we map Rival role types to the closest BambooHR equivalent (Employee access level) and flag any Rival custom permission sets that require manual reconfiguration in BambooHR's Access Control settings post-migration.