Migration Checklist: Moving to BambooHR

Phase 0

Decide & Plan

Lock scope, ownership, and constraints before any export job runs.

• Document the list of in-scope BambooHR modules. Decide which of core HR, Hiring (ATS), Onboarding, Time Off, Time Tracking, Performance Management, Benefits Administration, and Payroll are part of this project. Record each as in or out of scope.

  Risk if skipped: Mid-project scope additions force re-running mapping, sandbox tests, and access-level design from the start.

• Define historical-data scope per object. Decide how many years of Job Info, Compensation, Employment Status, Time Off ledger entries, performance assessments, and uploaded documents move across. Record cut-off dates per object.

  Risk if skipped: Without an explicit cut-off, the export expands into a multi-year dump that no one budgeted for transforming.

• Confirm BambooHR Payroll suitability for your geography. BambooHR Payroll runs US-only. If you have non-US employees, confirm that they will sit in BambooHR for core HR while payroll runs in a separate system, and document the boundary.

  Risk if skipped: Discovering the US-only payroll constraint after employees are loaded forces a parallel payroll project under time pressure.

• Pick the BambooHR plan (Core or Pro) and confirm required add-ons. Performance Management, Benefits Administration, Time Tracking, Hiring, and Payroll are separately priced. Confirm which the project will purchase before designing field schemas.

  Risk if skipped: Mapping work targeted at a module that is later cut wastes weeks of transform engineering.

• Assign a single accountable migration owner (DRI). Name one person responsible for go/no-go on cutover. Document an escalation chain that includes HR, Payroll, IT, and Finance representatives.
• Capture GDPR, residency, and retention obligations. BambooHR is a US-hosted SOC 2 Type II processor. If you process EU employee data, document the Data Processing Agreement, transfer-impact assessment, and the retention rules that change on cutover.

  Risk if skipped: Legal blocks the import on go-live day when residency or DPA review was not completed earlier.

• Set the cutover date, source freeze window, and parallel-run window. Choose a date that avoids payroll close, open-enrollment, and performance-review windows. Define the freeze window during which the source HR system goes read-only.

  Risk if skipped: A cutover during payroll close forces a partial cutover and a hand-reconciled pay run.

• Document the migration success criteria in writing. List the row counts, balance reconciliations, and user-acceptance checks that must pass before the project is closed. Include the source-system decommission date.
• List explicitly out-of-scope items. Examples: legacy survey results, deactivated user logins, training-platform completions, fitness-benefit balances. Capture them so they do not silently re-enter scope mid-project.

Phase 1

Pre-Migration Prep

Source-system cleansing and destination-tenant configuration before any export.

Phase 2

Source Export

Pull every object you will need out of the source system in a transformable shape.

• Export the master employee list to CSV with all standard and custom fields. Include first name, last name, work email, hire date, employment status, department, division, location, manager, pay rate, pay schedule, EEO category, and every custom field from the Phase 1 audit.
• Export Job Info history per employee. Export every effective-dated row that changed Job Title, Department, Division, Location, Manager, or Reports To. Keep the original effective date on each row.

  Risk if skipped: Collapsing history into a current snapshot loses the audit trail that the BambooHR Job Info table is designed to preserve.

• Export Compensation history per employee. Export salary, hourly rate, currency, pay schedule, and effective date for each compensation change. Include bonus history with date, amount, and reason.

  Risk if skipped: Loading only a current pay rate loses the comp ladder used by retention analysis and pay-equity reviews.

• Export Employment Status history per employee. Include Active, Leave, Terminated, Contractor, and any custom statuses with the date each became effective.
• Export US demographic fields where collected. Gender, ethnicity, EEO Job Category, veteran status, and disability status. Export each into a column with the source picklist value preserved.
• Export Time Off balances and ledger entries as of the freeze date. Per employee, per policy, export current balance, year-to-date accrued, year-to-date taken, and the full ledger of accrual and usage transactions.

  Risk if skipped: Without a ledger you can only restore today's balance, not the audit trail needed for legal and payroll disputes.

• Export approved and pending time-off requests. Export request id, employee, policy, start date, end date, hours, status, and approver for each in-flight request.
• Export Performance Management data. Export goals, self-assessments, manager assessments, peer feedback, and 360-degree review responses with their original timestamps.
• Export the org chart as a Reports-To list. BambooHR builds the org chart from the Supervisor field on each employee. Export one row per employee with employee email and supervisor email.

  Risk if skipped: A manager who is missing from the file or whose email is misspelled breaks the entire branch below them in the org chart.

• Export Department, Division, and Location lookup tables. Pull the raw list of values so the Phase 3 mapping spreadsheet can resolve mismatches against the BambooHR-side list.
• Export the user list and access roles. Capture which users had admin, manager, payroll-admin, or read-only access in the source so Phase 1 access-level decisions stay grounded in reality.
• Export employee documents and their metadata. Pull binaries (PDF, DOCX, PNG, JPG) and a metadata file with employee email, document category, original filename, and upload date.

  Risk if skipped: Without metadata you have a folder of files no one can re-attach to the right employee.

• Capture screenshots and configuration exports of source-system automations. Onboarding workflows, offboarding checklists, time-off auto-approvals, and notification rules will be rebuilt by hand in BambooHR.
• Record the exact timestamp of each export. Log the date and time per export file. The delta between this timestamp and cutover is what you re-export on cutover day.

Phase 3

Transform & Map

Turn raw source files into BambooHR-shaped imports.

Phase 4

Sandbox Test Migration

Catch every problem in the sandbox before the Import Tool runs in production.

• Load a 5–10 employee sample via the BambooHR Import Tool. Pick a sample that covers active, terminated, on-leave, contractor, and international employees so edge cases surface early.

  Risk if skipped: A sample of only US active employees hides the bugs that hit the harder cases in production.

• Walk through the Import Tool tutorial before the first sandbox load. The Import Tool has no undo. Confirm the operator has watched the training and run the interactive guide at least once.

  Risk if skipped: An accidental destructive import in production requires a manual revert that takes longer than the original load.

• Validate 5–10 random sandbox employees field by field. Compare each value side-by-side against the source. Note dates, currency, country, and custom-field mismatches.
• Test edge cases: names with non-ASCII characters, multi-line addresses, leading zeros in IDs. Confirm BambooHR's importer round-trips the special characters and preserves leading zeros on text-typed numeric fields.
• Test the two-pass org-chart load. Load employees first without supervisors, then back-fill the Reports To field. Confirm the org chart renders without orphan branches.
• Load a sample Job Info, Compensation, and Employment Status history. Confirm the effective-dated rows display in chronological order on the employee profile.

  Risk if skipped: Effective-date sort issues only show up in the UI, which masks the problem until UAT.

• Load a sample of opening Time Off balances via Adjust Balance. Confirm the adjustment displays in the employee's ledger with the migration reason and that the future-balance calculator extrapolates correctly.
• Upload sample documents to confirm size and category routing. Confirm files arrive in the correct Employee File category and that the 20 MB cap blocks oversize files cleanly.
• Load a sample of Performance goals and assessments. Confirm goal status, due date, and any attached files render correctly in the employee profile.
• Run a full-volume dry run in the sandbox. Load the entire employee list plus historical tables and time the run. Multiply by a safety factor to forecast cutover-window duration.

  Risk if skipped: A cutover window that turns out to be too short forces a partial go-live with employees split between systems.

• Capture every error code and row id from the sandbox import logs. Categorize errors as recoverable (fix the transform) vs. non-recoverable (drop the row, document the reason).
• Have an HR domain expert review 25 sandbox employees. Pick an HR Admin who does not work on the migration. Their job: spot anything that 'looks wrong' to a daily user.
• Get written sign-off on sandbox results before cutover scheduling. The DRI signs off on row counts, balance reconciliations, and the sandbox UAT report.

  Risk if skipped: Skipping sign-off lets the cutover proceed with known sandbox defects still unresolved.

Phase 5

Production Cutover

The tightly-sequenced execution window where the migration actually happens.

• Confirm the source-system freeze is in effect. Verify there are no employee, time-off, or compensation changes in the source in the hour before export.

  Risk if skipped: Late source-side edits create a delta that the cutover plan has no time to reconcile.

• Take a final full export of source data. Re-run every export from Phase 2 at the freeze time so the import file reflects the exact state at cutover.
• Disable BambooHR integrations and notification workflows. Pause Slack, Microsoft Teams, Okta provisioning, calendar sync, payroll push, and onboarding workflows for the duration of the import.

  Risk if skipped: Active integrations fire during the bulk load, sending hundreds of welcome emails for back-dated hires.

• Load Access Levels and Custom Access Levels first. Create the role tiers before employees, then assign employees to roles as part of the employee load.
• Load active employees first via the Import Tool, supervisors blank. First-pass file: every active employee without their Reports To field set. Use the upsert key chosen in Phase 3.
• Load terminated employees and contractors next. Run a separate file that imports inactive employees with employment status pre-set, so they do not appear in active rosters.
• Back-fill the Reports To field in a second pass. Update each employee's Supervisor field via the Import Tool now that every supervisor exists.

  Risk if skipped: A typo in the supervisor email field on first pass leaves the org chart broken and routes manager-only reports to the wrong people.

• Load Job Info, Compensation, and Employment Status history. Load one row per effective-dated change. Capture the resulting row id for each insert.
• Load Custom Tables: Education, Certifications, Licenses, and any custom multi-row tables. One CSV per table, keyed by employee id.
• Load Time Off categories, policies, and opening balances. Confirm categories and policies exist; then use Adjust Balance per employee to set opening balances as of cutover. Tag every adjustment with the migration reason.
• Upload employee documents in batches by category. Confirm each file is under 20 MB and each employee's total stays under 1 GB.
• Capture row counts, error logs, and job ids for every load step. Save the Import Tool history and the load job ids in the migration runbook for audit and rollback evidence.

  Risk if skipped: Without per-step evidence a partial failure has no recovery point and the team starts the load over from row one.

• Re-enable BambooHR integrations and notification workflows. Resume Slack, Microsoft Teams, Okta provisioning, payroll, and onboarding integrations only after every load step is reconciled.

Phase 6

Validate

Prove the migration was correct before any user logs in.

• Reconcile total active employee count between source and BambooHR. Pull the Active employee count via List Employees or a custom report. The number must match the Phase 1 baseline minus any agreed exclusions.

  Risk if skipped: An unexplained delta of even a handful of employees signals a silent drop somewhere in the transform.

• Reconcile terminated employee count. Confirm every terminated source employee landed as inactive in BambooHR (or was excluded per Phase 3).
• Reconcile total annualized payroll across active employees. Aggregate the current pay rate times pay frequency for every active employee and compare to the source figure.

  Risk if skipped: A wrong pay-rate type (hourly vs. salary) on a batch of employees inflates or deflates the total by a factor of 2,000.

• Reconcile Time Off opening balances per policy per employee. Confirm BambooHR balance equals the Phase 3 computed balance to within one decimal place. Investigate every mismatch.

  Risk if skipped: Off-by-one balance errors generate dozens of HR tickets in the first week and erode trust in the new system.

• Cross-check 30 random employees field by field against the source. Pick employees at random across departments, statuses, and tenures. Walk every field on each profile and confirm parity.
• Verify the org chart renders without orphan branches. Open the BambooHR org chart and confirm every employee has the correct supervisor and that the CEO sits alone at the top.
• Sample 20 Job Info history rows for ordering and date accuracy. Confirm rows display in chronological order and that effective dates were not silently re-stamped to cutover.
• Sample 20 Compensation history rows for amount, currency, and date accuracy. Confirm currency tagging carried across for non-default-currency rows and that bonus rows landed in the Bonus table, not Compensation.
• Spot-check 15 employees' uploaded documents for category, filename, and access. Open each document, confirm it renders, and confirm the right access levels can see it.
• Verify Performance goals, assessments, and 360 records attached to the right employees. Sample 10 employees and confirm their goal history and assessment responses match the source.
• Run a SOC 2 / GDPR evidence collection pass. Capture the import job ids, who ran them, and when. File alongside the DPA and transfer-impact assessment captured in Phase 0.
• Have 3–5 power users complete their day-one workflows in BambooHR. Cover request time off, approve time off, look up an employee, run a custom report, and run the directory.

  Risk if skipped: Workflow gaps surface only at this layer and are cheaper to fix before go-live than after.

• Document every UAT-surfaced data issue and assign an owner. Triage as block-go-live vs. fix-post-cutover. Block-go-live items go back into the cutover runbook for re-load.
• Get written sign-off from the migration sponsor before Phase 7. Sponsor signs off on row-count reconciliation, balance reconciliation, and the UAT report.

Phase 7

Post-Migration Cleanup

Wrap up so the team can treat BambooHR as the system of record.

• Announce go-live to all employees with login URL and help contact. Include the BambooHR mobile-app download links (iOS and Android) and a short FAQ for password reset and time-off requests.
• Run role-based training sessions. Employee self-service (15 minutes), manager workflows (30 minutes), HR Admin deep dive (60 minutes). Record each session for new hires.
• Set the source HR system to read-only. Disable writes per the freeze-window plan. Communicate the read-only date to the team that still references historical data.
• Rebuild source-system reports inside BambooHR. Custom reports and dashboards do not transfer. List the top 10 reports the team relied on and rebuild each via BambooHR's reporting UI.

  Risk if skipped: Without rebuilt reports the HR team falls back to the source system within a week, undermining cutover.

• Rebuild onboarding and offboarding workflows. Convert the source-system checklists into BambooHR Onboarding tasks and offboarding tasks. Map approvers and notification routing.
• Re-establish Slack, Microsoft Teams, calendar, and SSO integrations. Confirm Okta provisioning works for new hires before disabling the manual create step.
• Connect ATS, Payroll, Benefits Administration, and Time Tracking add-ons. If purchased in Phase 0, configure each add-on after the core HR data is stable. Run a dry pay calc before the first real run.

  Risk if skipped: A first real payroll run on uncorroborated data is the most expensive way to find an import defect.

• Schedule a 30-day post-migration retrospective. Capture what went well, what surprised the team, and which Phase 3 transform rules need updating for any future re-runs.
• Set the source-system decommission date. Typically 90 days after cutover, after the final retention window has closed. Document who signs off on shutdown.
• Archive source-system exports and the migration runbook to long-term storage. Encrypt the archive, store the key separately, and record retention duration per compliance policy.
• Update the access-level matrix and remove the dedicated migration Account Owner. Lower the migration user's role to read-only or deactivate it once the audit trail is captured.
• Close the migration project formally. Final status report, lessons learned, and a project-closure note distributed to stakeholders.