Migrate from Sage People to BambooHR

Sage People Employee records map to BambooHR Employee. Standard fields (name, date of birth, contact information, employee number, hire date, termination date, employment status) migrate directly. Custom fields use UD_, UDF_, or IM_ prefixes in Sage People; we detect non-prefixed custom fields by comparing against the reference schema and flag them for explicit mapping before import. The BambooHR Employee record is the parent; nested tabs (Employment, Compensation, Time Off, Benefits) are populated in sequence after the parent record is created.

Sage People Department records map to BambooHR Department. Parent-child hierarchy (cost center codes and parent department references) migrates as a top-down import so that parent references exist before child records. Department names and codes map to BambooHR name and id fields respectively. If the Sage People org uses multiple hierarchies (e.g., a reporting hierarchy and a cost-center hierarchy), we map the primary reporting hierarchy and document the secondary for manual configuration in BambooHR.

Sage People separates Job templates from Position records. We migrate both: the Job title becomes the BambooHR Job Title field on the Employment tab, and the Position record carries effective dates, employment type, and work location. If a Sage People employee holds multiple concurrent positions, we create multiple Employment records in BambooHR with different job titles and effective dates.

Sage People Absence records map to BambooHR Time Off entries. Accrual rates, carryover rules, balance caps, and leave type definitions migrate as individual Time Off records with the appropriate accrual policy reference. We flag custom absence types that have no direct BambooHR equivalent (e.g., cultural leave, unpaid sabbatical) for manual policy configuration in BambooHR's Time Off settings.

Sage People stores salary, bonus, and compensation change records as effective-dated pay entries per Employee. We migrate these as a time-series of BambooHR Compensation records with effective dates, pay rate, pay type, and change reason. Custom compensation components (e.g., car allowance, equity grants stored as non-standard fields) require explicit mapping because BambooHR's Compensation object supports a limited set of standard fields; extended components are mapped to BambooHR custom fields on the Compensation tab.

Sage People Enhanced Objectives and performance review records migrate as BambooHR Goals. We map objective text, metric targets, due dates, and review status (draft, active, completed). Known Sage People state-machine issues with draft vs active review states are flagged during migration: any objective with an inconsistent state in Sage People is logged and excluded from migration until the source state is corrected. Goals with no end date or no defined owner are flagged for manual review post-migration.

Sage People Recruitment data (candidates, applications, vacancy postings) migrates to BambooHR Job Applications if the destination account has BambooHR's ATS module enabled. Candidates map to Job Application with applicant name, email, application date, and vacancy reference. Vacancy configurations (requirements, compensation bands) are documented as configuration notes for manual re-entry because they involve linked content that does not export cleanly. If the destination does not include BambooHR ATS, candidate and vacancy data is excluded from the migration scope.

Sage People Employee documents (contracts, certifications) are stored as Salesforce attachments with binary blobs and time-limited URLs that expire after approximately two minutes. We pre-fetch all document attachment URLs in a batch queue and download them immediately before inserting into BambooHR, bypassing the two-minute expiration window. Each document is re-associated with the corresponding BambooHR Employee via the employee ID map. Document metadata (filename, upload date, file type) migrates; document tags and categorization are preserved as notes on the file record.

Sage People does not expose workflow definitions or approval routing rules through its API. Leave approval chains, onboarding workflows, and manager escalation paths cannot be transferred automatically. During discovery we document every active Sage People workflow as a configuration inventory: trigger conditions, routing paths, escalation rules, and approval thresholds. BambooHR's approval workflows for time-off and expenses serve as the rebuild target; complex multi-step approval chains require configuration in BambooHR's workflow builder by the customer's admin post-migration.

Sage People custom fields use advisory prefixes (UD_, UDF_, IM_) that are not consistently enforced across orgs. We detect non-prefixed custom fields by comparing the live schema against a reference schema of standard Sage People fields, flag each for explicit type mapping (text, number, date, picklist, checkbox), and map picklist values as explicit value lists in BambooHR custom fields. Custom fields without a data type in the Sage People schema are flagged for admin review before mapping.