How does Joinly sync Justworks to Active Directory?

Joinly reads each member change in the Justworks directory in the cloud through a unified HR API connector, then hands the action to the Joinly AD Agent inside your network, which makes the change in Active Directory. Justworks holds the authoritative member record; the agent is the only component that touches your domain.

1. Joiner. An admin adds the new member in Justworks. Joinly reads the new record, determines the role from title, department and office, 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. Contractors follow a separate rule so they land in a scoped OU with limited group access.

2. Mover. When someone changes title, department or manager, 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 a member is offboarded in Justworks and their end date passes, Joinly instructs the agent to disable the AD account and optionally move it to a disabled-users OU, so nothing is left active after someone leaves.

Example: A non-profit runs Justworks for HR and an on-premise AD for its case-management and finance systems across two sites. It hires a programme coordinator. Joinly reads the member record, and the AD Agent creates the user in the Site-A > Programmes OU, sets a unique sAMAccountName, and adds the Programmes group. When the non-profit takes on a seasonal fundraising contractor, Joinly applies the contractor rule so the agent creates a scoped object in a Contractors OU with only the access that role needs, and disables it automatically when the engagement ends.

What manual AD account management costs

Without automation, every account starts as a note from HR that an admin works through in Active Directory Users and Computers by hand — creating the object, choosing the OU, building the sAMAccountName, adding groups. Justworks has no native path to on-premise AD at all, so the fallback is a manual export or a script, which offers no role-to-group logic and no contractor handling — so the decisions still fall 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 members change role, 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 a lingering contractor account in AD is an easy thing to miss on a small team.

Joinly vs. the Entra provisioning agent for AD

There is no Microsoft-published path that reads Justworks and writes to on-premise AD, so the realistic alternative is a manual export or a home-grown script feeding the directory. Here’s how that compares to the Joinly AD Agent for a Justworks-driven AD setup.

Watch-outs when connecting Justworks to Active Directory

A few details decide whether this connection stays reliable as your team grows.

• 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 a flat directory. Justworks puts a member in one department with no hierarchy, so there’s no structure to inherit. Joinly builds explicit rules that place each user — and move them on a change — into the correct OU from title, department and office.

• Contractors alongside employees. Justworks lists contractors and employees together as members. Joinly keys off the member type so contractors land in a scoped OU with limited groups, rather than getting a full staff object in AD.

• No public provisioning API. Justworks exposes no open lifecycle API, so Joinly reads the directory through a unified HR API connector and drives all the AD logic itself. The agent applies those decisions inside your network without depending on a Justworks push.

• 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 Justworks 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 non-profit with around 300 staff and volunteers across several locations, running Justworks for HR but still living in an on-premise Active Directory for its case-management and finance systems. Every new coordinator, caseworker or seasonal fundraiser starts as a note to the one-person IT team, who processes it by hand in AD — creating the object, choosing the OU, building the login, adding groups. With grant cycles and seasonal contracts the queue never empties, and new joiners wait until day two or three for their account.

Connect Justworks to Active Directory with Joinly and that work disappears. The Joinly AD Agent creates each user in the right OU on their start date, builds a unique sAMAccountName, adds the correct security groups, separates contractors into a scoped OU, moves people on a role change and disables accounts on the end date with a 30-day grace window — all driven by the member change in Justworks.

“With one person doing IT, contractor accounts used to pile up in AD. Now a caseworker is ready in the right OU on day one, seasonal staff are scoped automatically, and we can show a funder’s auditor exactly which Justworks change created every account.” — Head of IT, non-profit organisation

The outcome this setup is designed for: onboarding drops from days to zero touch, contractor and volunteer accounts stop accumulating in AD, and the team can walk into its next audit with a complete, source-backed trail.