Teams building anything that hangs off staff — kit registers, training matrices, certification expiry, rotas — who currently keep a copy of the employee list and watch it drift.
Pull BambooHR into RowFold tables you own — filter them, report on them, link them to everything else in the workspace.
And it stays current: importing again updates the same tables, adding new records and updating changed ones, so links from your other tables hold. Keep in sync does that for you hourly or daily.
What it doesn't do: There are no automation steps that write back to BambooHR. It has no say in what a booking page offers. An import only reads: nothing is written back to BambooHR, a record deleted there stays here, and a sync runs hourly at most rather than the moment something changes. Anything else you have read about BambooHR and RowFold, this page is the authority: it is generated from the connector's own code.
The directory is the spine. Import it before building the thing you actually came to build, because retrofitting a relation onto a table full of typed names is considerably more work than starting with real records.
You'll know it worked: Check the row count against the active employee count in BambooHR, and confirm a person you know recently joined is present. If they are missing, the import probably predates them rather than having skipped anybody.
This is the thing the directory unlocks and it takes one table of your own. The important part is that the expiry is a real date rather than text, because a rule cannot count down a string.
You'll know it worked: Set one test certification to expire in 30 days and confirm exactly one chase goes out, to both the employee and their manager. Then set one against a leaver and confirm nothing does.
Every operational system needs a list of employees and none of them has one, so each grows a copy. The kit register, the training matrix and the rota each have their own spelling of the same twelve names.
Import the directory once and link everything to it. One person record, with the assets, the training and the shifts all pointing at it.
Leavers are the expensive case. Somebody leaves, HR updates BambooHR, and the kit register still shows a laptop against their name eighteen months later because nobody told the spreadsheet.
Mark a leaver once on the directory, and a single view lists everything still assigned to them: the laptop nobody collected, the certification nobody reassigned. What was an annual discovery becomes a query.
Certifications and training expire silently. The matrix is a spreadsheet, the dates are text, and the first anybody knows is when a certificate is asked for and has lapsed.
Expiry is a real date on a record linked to a real person, so a rule can chase it weeks ahead rather than nobody noticing.
BambooHR signs its photo links and those signatures expire after a while, so a link that worked when imported eventually stops. That is a property of how BambooHR serves images rather than anything going wrong here, and the import says so in its warnings. Importing again leaves a filled photo link alone, because BambooHR re-signs it on every read and replacing it would mark every employee as changed on every run; clear the cell and the next import fills a fresh one. If photos matter for good, copy them into an Attachment field on the directory.
No. The connection reads the directory and nothing else, so BambooHR remains the HR record and nothing you do here can change an employee's details. That is the right way round: HR data has approval processes, audit requirements and legal obligations attached to it, none of which belong to a second system that happened to import a copy.
Mark them on the directory in RowFold, with a status or a leaving date in a column of your own, which the import never touches. Importing again updates the directory your other tables link to and adds new starters, but a leaver drops out of BambooHR's directory, so their record simply stops being updated here rather than disappearing. Once leavers are marked, anything still linked to them becomes findable: the laptop nobody collected, the certification nobody reassigned, the shifts still on the rota.
It is more sensitive than most things you will import, and worth treating that way. Per-table and per-field permissions mean the tables that hang off it can be widely readable while the directory itself is not, and it is worth deciding that before anybody else sees the workspace rather than afterwards. Import only what you actually need to link against.
The directory is what comes across. That covers the case this exists for, which is giving your own operational tables real people to point at. Compensation in particular is not something to copy casually into a second system, since it multiplies the number of places a confidential figure lives without improving anything about how it is managed.
There is no template to wait for. Type a sentence about what you run and RowFold assembles the tables, links, views and dashboard around it — then you change whatever does not fit.