How does Joinly sync PayFit to Active Directory?

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

1. Joiner. HR completes the hire in PayFit. Joinly reads the new collaborator and their contract, determines the role from job title, department and company, 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 contract start date.

2. Mover. When a collaborator changes role, department or company, or a new contract becomes the active one, 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 position is removed, so permissions stay aligned with the actual job.

3. Leaver. On the contract end date, Joinly instructs the agent to disable the AD account and optionally move it to a disabled-users OU. Multiple contracts are taken into account, so an account is only disabled when the last active contract ends.

Example: A retail chain runs PayFit and an on-premise AD across its stores and head office. It hires a store assistant with a start date next Monday, on the retail company (SIRET). Joinly reads the collaborator and contract, and on Monday morning the AD Agent creates the user in the Stores > Region-North OU, sets the sAMAccountName to a unique pattern, and adds the Store-Staff group. When the assistant later moves to a head-office role, 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 PayFit change that an admin works through in Active Directory Users and Computers by hand — creating the object, choosing the OU, building the sAMAccountName, adding groups. A generic HRIS connector rarely writes to on-premise AD at all, so the decisions — and often the whole job — 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 movers change role or company, 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 with multi-contract collaborators it is easy to disable an account while another contract is still active.

Joinly vs. the Entra provisioning agent for AD

Microsoft’s Entra provisioning agent can write to on-premise AD, but PayFit isn’t a native Entra source, so there is no supported PayFit-to-AD path through it. Joinly’s AD Agent reads PayFit directly and writes to your domain. Here’s how the two compare for a PayFit-driven AD setup.

Watch-outs when connecting PayFit 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 company and department. PayFit’s company (SIRET) and department 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.

• The contract is the central object. In PayFit a collaborator is tied to one or more contracts, and by default PayFit exposes the last active contract only. Joinly applies explicit rules to pick the contract that should own the AD account, so the object reflects the person’s real current position and not a stale contract.

• Multi-contract collaborators. A collaborator can hold more than one active contract. Joinly keeps a single, stable AD object driven by the primary contract, so a second contract adds groups rather than creating a duplicate account.

• 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 PayFit 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 retail chain with around 1,800 employees across 90 stores and a head office, running PayFit but still living in an on-premise Active Directory for its till, rota and stock systems. Every new store assistant, supervisor or head-office hire starts as a PayFit change that IT processes by hand in AD — creating the object, choosing the store OU, building the login, adding groups. With seasonal peaks and constant store-to-store moves the queue never empties, and new joiners wait until day two or three for their account.

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

“During the seasonal peak we hire hundreds of people across stores, and AD accounts were always the bottleneck. Now an account is simply ready in the right store OU on day one, moves follow the person, and we can show the auditor which PayFit change created every bit of access.” — Head of IT, retail chain

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