How does Joinly sync Paylocity to Active Directory?

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

1. Joiner. HR completes the hire in Paylocity. Joinly reads the new record, determines the role from department, position, cost center and work location, 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 position, department, cost center or work 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 the employee’s status code in Paylocity flips to terminated on the effective date, Joinly instructs the agent to disable the AD account and optionally move it to a disabled-users OU. A leave-of-absence status doesn’t trigger an unwanted disable.

Example: A regional credit union runs Paylocity and an on-premise AD across nine branches. It hires a member-services representative with a start date next Monday, in cost center 310 (Retail Banking) at its Main Street branch. Joinly reads the record, and on Monday morning the AD Agent creates the user in the Branch-MainStreet > Retail OU, sets the sAMAccountName to a unique pattern, and adds the Retail-Banking group. When the rep later moves to the loans team, 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 Paylocity report that an admin works through in Active Directory Users and Computers by hand — creating the object, choosing the OU, building the sAMAccountName, adding groups. Paylocity’s native Entra integration is SSO and SCIM into Paylocity, with no on-premise AD provisioning at all, so the decisions and the manual work still fall to people.

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

• Permissions that don’t keep up (privilege creep). When movers change position or cost center, 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 when a status code only changes inside Paylocity, IT may never hear about the leaver at all.

Joinly vs. provisioning Paylocity to AD by hand

Paylocity has no native on-premise AD provisioning — its Microsoft integration is SSO and SCIM into Paylocity — so the realistic alternatives are a manual ADUC process or a third-party connector. Here’s how Joinly compares for a Paylocity-driven AD setup.

Watch-outs when connecting Paylocity to Active Directory

A few Paylocity-specific 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 cost centers. Paylocity’s cost-center and labor-level hierarchy, plus work location, 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.

• Multiple companies under one client. A single Paylocity client can hold several companies, each with its own Company ID, and a person can move between them. Joinly merges the population into one AD object per person, so a cross-company transfer moves the object rather than creating a second account.

• Customizable employee status codes. Employee Status in Paylocity is a client-defined code, not a fixed list. Joinly maps your specific active, terminated and leave-of-absence codes to the right AD action, so a real termination disables the account and a leave of absence doesn’t.

• 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 Paylocity 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 regional credit union with around 600 employees across nine branches, running Paylocity for HR and payroll but still living in an on-premise Active Directory for its core banking and teller systems. Every new member-services rep, loan officer or branch manager starts as a Paylocity report that IT processes by hand in AD — creating the object, choosing the OU from the cost center, building the login, adding groups. With seasonal hiring and frequent branch transfers the queue never empties, and new joiners wait until day two or three for their account.

Connect Paylocity to Active Directory with Joinly and that work disappears. The Joinly AD Agent creates each user in the right OU on the start date, builds a unique sAMAccountName, adds the correct security groups, moves people on a branch or cost-center transfer and disables accounts when the status code flips to terminated, with a 30-day grace window — all driven by the HR change in Paylocity.

“An account is simply ready in the right branch OU when the new teller walks in, transfers between branches move themselves, and we can show the examiner exactly which Paylocity change created every bit of access.” — Head of IT, regional credit union

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.