How does Joinly sync Gusto to Active Directory?

Joinly reads each HR change in Gusto in the cloud, then hands the action to the Joinly AD Agent inside your network, which makes the change in Active Directory. Gusto holds the authoritative employee record; the agent is the only component that touches your domain.

1. Joiner. HR adds the new hire in Gusto. Joinly reads the employee, job and department records, determines the role, and instructs the AD Agent to create the user in the correct OU, build the sAMAccountName and UPN from your rules, and add the right security groups — timed to the hire date.

2. Mover. When someone changes department, job or location, Joinly tells the agent to move the user to the matching OU, swap security-group membership and update attributes. Access that no longer fits the new role is removed, so permissions stay aligned with the actual job.

3. Leaver. When an employee is terminated in Gusto, Joinly instructs the agent to disable the AD account and optionally move it to a disabled-users OU, on the termination date recorded in Gusto.

Example: A hospitality group runs Gusto and an on-premise AD across its restaurants. It hires a floor supervisor with a start date next Monday at the Downtown location. Joinly reads the record, and on Monday morning the AD Agent creates the user in the Downtown > FrontOfHouse OU, sets the sAMAccountName to a unique pattern, and adds the FOH-Supervisors group. When the supervisor later moves to a manager job at another site, the agent moves the object to the new OU and swaps the groups the same day.

What manual AD account management costs

Without automation, every account starts as a Gusto notification that an admin works through in Active Directory Users and Computers by hand — creating the object, choosing the OU, building the sAMAccountName, adding groups. Gusto has no native path to on-premise AD at all, so every decision falls to people.

• Onboarding delays. New joiners wait for an AD account and group access while a request sits in a queue, losing productive days in their first week.

• Permissions that don’t keep up (privilege creep). When movers change department or job, old security-group membership often stays attached, so people accumulate rights they no longer need.

• Forgotten offboarding. Accounts that aren’t disabled on time are a security and audit risk, and in a high-turnover business they pile up quickly.

Joinly vs. the Entra provisioning agent for AD

Gusto has no native route to on-premise AD, so the realistic comparison is between the Joinly AD Agent and the general Microsoft Entra provisioning agent path — which still needs a source Entra can read, and Gusto is not one it reads natively. Here’s how the two compare for a Gusto-driven AD setup.

Watch-outs when connecting Gusto to Active Directory

A few details decide whether this connection stays reliable at scale.

• sAMAccountName uniqueness and length. AD limits the sAMAccountName to 20 characters and it must be unique across the domain. Joinly builds it from your rules with a fallback pattern, so duplicate names never produce a collision or a truncated, unreadable login.

• OU placement from departments and locations. Gusto departments, jobs and work locations don’t map one-to-one to your OU structure. Joinly builds explicit rules that place each user — and move them on a transfer — into the correct OU.

• One employee, multiple jobs. In Gusto an employee can hold more than one job. A naive read can place the account on the wrong job’s title or OU. Joinly resolves the active job so the AD object reflects the current role.

• No native Gusto-to-AD path. Gusto exposes a REST API but nothing that writes to on-premise AD, and there is no inbound SCIM endpoint. Joinly reads the Gusto API, handles OAuth 2.0 token refresh, and drives AD through the agent, so you don’t build or maintain any of it.

• Service-account permissions. The agent acts under a service account with delegated rights. Joinly works with least-privilege delegation scoped to the target OUs, so the agent can create, move and disable users without domain-admin rights.

Joinly handles each of these by default with custom mapping and transformation.

Always audit-ready

Every account action the Joinly AD Agent performs is logged in the Joinly cloud: who was affected, when it happened, which OU and groups changed and which Gusto change triggered it. For NIS2 that matters directly: access can be traced back to an authorised HR source rather than an ad-hoc request. Joinly is ISO 27001 certified, runs in an EU data centre in Amsterdam, applies least-privilege by default, and is built to meet NIS2 and ISO 27001.

Example case

Take a restaurant and hospitality group with around 900 staff across eighteen locations, running Gusto for payroll but still living in an on-premise Active Directory for its point-of-sale and back-office systems. Every new server, cook or shift supervisor starts as a Gusto notification that IT processes by hand in AD — creating the object, choosing the location OU, building the login, adding groups. With constant seasonal turnover the queue never empties, and new joiners regularly wait past their first shift for an account.

Connect Gusto to Active Directory with Joinly and that work disappears. The Joinly AD Agent creates each user in the right location OU on the hire date, builds a unique sAMAccountName, adds the correct security groups, moves people between sites on a transfer and disables accounts on the termination date with a 30-day grace window — all driven by the HR change in Gusto.

“With the turnover we have, manual AD accounts were a constant backlog. Now an account is ready in the right location OU when the shift starts, transfers move themselves, and we can show exactly which Gusto change created every bit of access.” — Head of IT, hospitality group

The outcome this setup is designed for: onboarding drops from days to zero touch, privilege creep from old roles is eliminated, and the team can walk into its next NIS2 assessment with a complete, source-backed audit trail.