Connecting Payfit to n8n: automating HR onboarding and payroll tracking without double entry

A new hire signs their contract in Payfit, and then their profile has to be recreated in the CRM, added to the team's Slack channel, declared in the access management tool, added to the internal directory — the same information re-typed four or five times by hand, with the risk of missing a step at every hire. Payfit recently opened a public, documented Open API (developers.payfit.io): enough to turn these repeated re-entries into an n8n pipeline that fires on its own whenever an HR event happens in Payfit.

Two APIs, one common use case

Payfit distinguishes two ways to access data: a Customer API, authenticated with a private API key specific to your company, meant for accessing your own data; and a Partner API, using OAuth2, aimed at vendors building a reusable integration for several distinct client companies, each authorizing access separately. For automating a single company's internal HR processes — the most common case with n8n — the Customer API is more than enough. The Partner API only becomes relevant for an agency operating several Payfit accounts on behalf of different clients, a scenario close to what our guide on hosting n8n for multiple clients covers.

Generating a Payfit API key

The company API key is created from the API Access tab, on the integrations configuration page in your Payfit admin settings. If that tab doesn't appear, API access depends on your contract tier: your Payfit account manager can enable it — better to check this before building the workflow than to discover it once the pipeline is done. Once generated, the key grants read access (and sometimes write access, depending on scopes) to the associated company's data — collaborators, contracts, absences.

Authenticating n8n against the API

The Payfit API is REST-based, returning JSON, and documented through a full OpenAPI specification on developers.payfit.io. In n8n, create an HTTP Header Auth credential (or Generic Credential Type → Header Auth) carrying the API key in the header Payfit expects, then reuse that credential in every HTTP Request node querying the API. As with any sensitive credential, never paste it directly into a Set node or an environment variable shared with other services — our guide to securing API credentials covers the right approach.

Onboarding: creating the collaborator everywhere, not just in Payfit

The collaborator creation endpoint accepts, for a given company, the new hire's first name, last name, personal email, and address, returning their Payfit ID in response. That same ID becomes the pipeline's pivot: a Payfit webhook notifying a collaborator's creation can then trigger, in sequence, their CRM profile, their addition to the right Slack channel, an account in the access management tool, and an update to an internal directory (Airtable or Notion, for instance). It's the same principle covered in our guide on automating new-employee onboarding, with Payfit as the HR source of truth instead of a manual form — and the natural counterpart to automated access revocation at offboarding the day that same collaborator leaves the company.

A study by Madanchian, published in Applied Sciences (MDPI) in 2024 ("From Recruitment to Retention: AI Tools for Human Resource Decision-Making," see on Google Scholar), notes that automation tools applied to onboarding reduce repetitive administrative work for HR teams while making the experience offered to each new hire more consistent — exactly the effect sought by eliminating manual re-entry between Payfit and the rest of a company's tools.

Absences: notifying without anyone checking a dashboard

The absences endpoint returns, for a company, the list of requests along with their status. Rather than leaving a manager to check the Payfit dashboard every morning, a Schedule Trigger (or, better, a webhook on status change) can automatically notify the relevant manager on Slack as soon as an absence is approved, with the dates and reason if that field is filled in. For cases where a human check is still needed before passing the information along elsewhere — a replacement to organize, a client to inform — the human-approval pattern via Slack closes the loop with a single click instead of requiring a trip back into the Payfit interface.

Moving from polling to webhooks

Polling the collaborators, contracts, or absences endpoints every hour works, but burns API calls to fetch, most of the time, nothing new. Payfit offers webhooks that notify key application events (a new collaborator, a contract change, among others): an n8n Webhook Trigger then replaces the Schedule Trigger, and the pipeline fires the moment the event happens in Payfit. As with any webhook exposed on the internet, verify the signature of the received payload before processing it (our guide to securing n8n webhooks covers the method) and plan for an idempotency mechanism to ignore duplicate deliveries, as explained in our dedicated guide — an HR webhook replayed twice should not create the same collaborator twice in the CRM.

Archiving for HR compliance

Payroll and contract data are among the most sensitive an organization handles, and their lifecycle doesn't end at the initial sync. Logging who triggered which action on which Payfit data — instead of letting a webhook write silently into your systems — follows the same principle as our guide to a GDPR audit trail with Supabase, and the question of how long copies synced outside Payfit (internal directory, CRM) should be kept ties back to our guide on automatically purging personal data at the end of its retention period.

Going further

This pipeline turns Payfit into an HR source of truth that automatically feeds the rest of your tools, without re-entry or gaps at every staff change. If your priority is precisely to trace every action triggered on sensitive data with a reliable timestamp, the Compliance & Audit Pack (€149) provides the Supabase logging building block, ready to plug in alongside these API calls. And if HR notifications also need to land by email rather than only on Slack, the Inbox AI Pack (€79) handles the sorting and prioritization of that mailbox. All three packs, combined in the Complete FlowKit Bundle (€269 instead of €347 bought separately), cover the whole journey, from the HR event to its compliant trace.