The cost of bad onboarding and why HBHR is 5*
API Integrations- Breaking Down the Walls: Why Open APIs & Integrations Are the Future of HR Tech
The Future of HR Tech:
Modern HR doesn’t live in a single system. It lives in the flow of information between your payroll
platform, your recruitment pipeline, your learning management system, your finance team’s ERP,
and the dozens of everyday tools your people already use to get their work done. The organisations that get HR right are the ones whose technology reflects that reality, and that only happens when the software they rely on is genuinely open.
At HBHR, we built our platform around a simple belief: an HR system should work with the rest of
your business, not against it. That belief shapes everything from our architecture to the partners we integrate with and it’s why our open API sits at the heart of our product.
The real cost of closed systems
For years, HR teams have quietly paid the price for software that refuses to play nicely with anything else. Payroll runs get delayed because data must be exported, reformatted, and re-imported. New starters are onboarded three separate times, once in the HRIS, once in the ERP, and once in the learning platform. Managers chase approvals across four different tools. Reporting means wrestling spreadsheets together from systems that were never designed to speak to one another.
The result is predictable: duplicated effort, inconsistent data, compliance risk, and a workforce that
loses faith in the tools meant to support them. Every hour spent rekeying information into a second system is an hour not spent on the work that matters, such as hiring well, developing people and shaping culture.
Open APIs solve this problem at the root. Rather than treating your HR platform as a walled garden, an open API treats it as a hub, a system that can send and receive the right information, to and from the right place, at the right time, with no human copying and pasting in between.
What “Open API” actually means at HBHR
There’s a lot of marketing language around APIs, so it’s worth being precise. When we say HBHR is
built on an open API, we mean that our endpoints are documented, versioned, and accessible to our customers and their partners, rather than being hidden behind bespoke engagements or gated
enterprise tiers. Data flows both ways, so your existing systems can write into HBHR and read from
it. Authentication is handled through modern, secure standards including OAuth and SSO via Azure and Okta. And where real-time connectivity matters, whether that’s Microsoft Teams notifications, hybrid-working status, or onboarding triggers, we support webhooks and Microsoft Graph API
integration out of the box.
In practical terms, this means our customers are never stuck. If you have a niche tool that matters to your business, it can connect. If you want to build an internal dashboard that pulls people data alongside finance data, you can. If your IT team wants to automate joiner- mover- leaver workflows across a dozen systems, they have everything they need to do it.
Built-In integrations across every category
Alongside our open API, HBHR ships with a growing library of pre-built integrations covering the
systems HR, finance, IT and operations teams use day to day. A snapshot of where we connect
today is set out below.
- Recruitment. HBHR connects directly to the job boards and sourcing channels where your next hires live, including LinkedIn, Indeed, Reed, Total Jobs, and Tes, as well as your own company website careers page. Vacancies are published once and candidates flow straight back into HBHR for screening, shortlisting and offers.
- Finance and Payroll. Payroll is one of the highest-stakes processes in any organisation, and it needs to be right every time. HBHR integrates with Sage, Xero, NetSuite, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, EduPay and Wagestream, so employee data, salary changes, absences and new starters land in Payroll automatically, with no double entry and no reconciliation headaches.
- IT & Collaboration. Through Microsoft Graph API and webhooks, HBHR plugs directly into Office 365, Microsoft Teams, SharePoint, and the wider Microsoft stack, which makes hybrid working and automated onboarding straightforward. We also integrate with Google Meet, Slack, and single sign- on via Azure and Okta, so your people access HBHR with the credentials they already use.
- ERP. HBHR connects to the enterprise systems that sit at the centre of larger organisations, including Microsoft Dynamics 365, Sage 300, SAP Business One, Epicor Kinetic, Acumatica Cloud ERP, and QuickBooks Enterprise. People data and organisational structure stay aligned across your entire backoffice.
- Business Intelligence. Data without insight is just noise. Our integrations with Power BI, Tableau, and Zoho Analytics let your BI team blend workforce data with the rest of the business, so you can model attrition against revenue, training investment against performance, or headcount against forecast without ever exporting a spreadsheet.
- Background Checks. Compliance starts before day one. HBHR integrates with Trust ID to automate right-to-work and identity checks as part of the onboarding journey.
- Learning Management. HBHR supports integrations with iHasco, Cornerstone, 360Learning,
CoreLearning, Eloomi, Kallidus, and TalentLMS, so mandatory training, compliance records, and development activity all flow back into the employee record automatically. - Education Sector. For schools, trusts, and multi-academy groups, HBHR integrates with BromCom, SIMS and Arbor, recognising that education HR has its own specific data flows around staff absence, cover and MIS alignment.
- Expenses. Expenses connect into SAP, QuickBooks, and SAP Concur, closing the loop between
people management and financial control.
Because of our open API, this list is a floor rather than a ceiling. If you rely on a tool that isn’t here,
our team can almost always get it connected, and in many cases our customers build those
connections themselves.
What This Means for Your Team
The practical benefit of a platform built this way isn’t a longer feature list. It’s a quieter one: fewer
errors, less manual work, faster onboarding, cleaner data, stronger compliance, and an HR function
that can finally spend its energy on strategy rather than admin.
It also means your technology estate is protected for the future. Tools will change. You’ll switch
Payroll providers, adopt a new BI stack, or bring in a new LMS, and when you do, an open platform
bends to fit, rather than forcing you into another rip-and-replace project
Why HBHR
HR technology has spent too long asking people to adapt to software. The next generation, the one we’re building, is software that adapts to people, to process, and to the rest of the business ecosystem it operates within.
An open API isn’t a nice-to-have feature buried on a spec sheet. It’s the difference between a
platform that locks you in and a platform that sets you free.
