Payroll Overview

Payroll data might seem like it's only important for calculating employee wages and taxes, but it can actually serve a multitude of useful purposes for businesses. For instance, it can provide valuable insights into employee turnover rates, allowing companies to identify potential retention problem areas and develop strategies to keep their employees happy and engaged. Additionally, analyzing payroll data can reveal patterns in employee behavior, such as absenteeism or tardiness, that can be addressed to improve workplace productivity. Furthermore, payroll data can also be used to create accurate staffing forecasts, ensuring businesses have the correct amount of employees on hand at all times. With so many potential applications, it's clear that payroll data is a valuable asset for any savvy person to leverage.

Data Provider Support

While API is the preferred access method many payroll software providers do not yet feature the necessary API access, to alleviate this and support the long tail of payroll providers we support report based access.

API access enables a continuous connection while report based access helps facilitate point in time access - both methods support as much historical data as is available.

API Access

With API access the employer grants permission by signing in to their payroll software and agreeing to provide access to their payroll data, the payroll provider delivers an API token which may then be used for an initial read of data as well as ongoing access. With this method we do not store any user name or password information, if the user changes their password the access is not revoked. Boss Insights manages the connection and ensures the API access is continuously available until specifically revoked either by the employer or by the financial institution.

Report Based Access

With report based access the employer has two options for sharing data:

Upload a detailed payment report file manually that they have previously downloaded
A guided experience using a browser extension

Regardless of which method is used to gather the source report the data will be automatically extracted and verified without any human intervention. As part of the verification process we can validate time periods provides as well as level of detail required.

The guided experience using a browser extension directs the employer to login to their payroll provider and then automatically navigates them to the correct payroll report generation page and prompts them with guidance to send the generated report back for processing - all within the payroll providers user interface that they already know and without us needing to know the username or password - providing a secure and trusted experience.

Getting Access

There are two ways of getting access to payroll data via Boss Insights:

Employer permissioned access via API or Report Based Access
Document conversion

Employer permissioned access

To get Payroll data an employer provides permissioned access either via API or report based access. Depending upon the level of access granted data can be obtained once or it can be continuously shared until explicitly disconnected.

Employer permissioned access to Payroll data provides read/write access to the payroll platforms we support.

The employer connects their payroll from a wide variety of supported providers

Document conversion tool

Are you tired of sifting through endless PDFs to track employee salaries and benefits? Look no further than our payroll data document conversion tool! With just a few clicks, you'll have access to detailed information on salaries, taxes, and other benefits in Excel or JSON format. Say goodbye to the headache of manual payroll management and hello to streamlined data access. With our tool, you'll get a better sense of the financial health of an organisation and its employees. Not only will this help you make more informed decisions, but it can also save time and money.

Document conversion API

Our API provides a document conversion endpoint which will take as input a payroll PDF and return after processing the cleaned and standardized data. The data can be returned in either Excel or JSON format. For more information on this approach see Document Conversion.

Data output

The payroll data can be output as either Excel or JSON format. Fields available for each employee and for each pay period include:

Field	Description
Platform	Which payroll software is providing the data, e.g. Gusto or ADP
Business/DBA	The name of the employer
Coverage Start	The start date of the pay period
Coverage End	The end date of the pay period
Employee Number	Any employee number or identifier
Employee Name	The full name of the employee
Pay Frequency	How often the employee is paid, e.g. Monthly, bi-weekly
Hourly Rate	The regular hourly rate
Salary	The annualized salary
Check Date	The date the salary payment was disbursed to the employee
Cheque Number	An identifier or reference for the salary payment
Gross Wages	The pre-tax wages earned
Social Security	Social security deductions
Medicare	Medicare deductions
Federal Tax	Any federal taxes
State Tax	Any state taxes
Local Tax	Any local taxes
Regular Hours	The number of hours the employee worked for in the pay period

In addition:

Overtime hours & wages, Holiday & sick hours
Deductions such as Dental, Health, HSA and other pre/post tax deductions
Commissions, Bonuses and Reimbursements
Company contributions to social security, medicare and more.

We do not provide full unmasked access to employee SSN, SIN or other tax identifiers

Source Documents

In addition to the cleaned and standardized data the raw source data is made available via our user interface and our API. In the case of source API access the raw data in JSON format can be obtained while the PDF document is available in the case of report based access.