If your organization uses an HR tool (a HRIS), such as the system your HR team uses to request and approve holiday or sick leave - Insightful can bring that time off into the app for you.
Rather than someone re-entering every approved absence by hand, PTO sync reads the requests that have already been approved in your HR tool and creates matching time off entries in Insightful, so that people who are away are shown as away.
PTO sync is switched on by an Admin, from the Configuration tab of an HRIS integration you have already connected.
Once it is on, entries created by the HRIS integration are labeled as coming from your HR tool and are read-only, so nobody can change them in Insightful by mistake. You can still add time off manually or import it by CSV for anything your HR tool does not cover.
The rest of this article explains what gets synced, how each kind of request is turned into an entry, and what happens when you switch sync on or off.
Before you turn on PTO sync
An HRIS integration needs to be active. PTO sync appears as a Configuration tab inside an integration you have already set up - it is not a separate integration.
Employees need to be matched. Time off is only synced for employees who are matched to a destination employee in Insightful.
An Admin needs to switch it on. PTO sync is off by default, so nothing is synced until an Admin turns it on.
Turning PTO sync on
Once an integration is active, an Admin can turn PTO sync on from the Configuration tab for that integration.
If an HR tool does not support time off data, the PTO sync toggle still appears but is disabled, with a tooltip explaining why.
Which time off entries are synced
Insightful syncs only the requests that have been approved in your HR tool, and only for employees who are matched to a destination employee in Insightful. Requests that have not been approved are not synced.
Each time it runs, the sync pulls entries from up to 31 days in the past, plus all available future entries.
Your HR tool's time off becomes an entry in Insightful
HR tools describe time off in different ways. Some send a date range, some send a single date with start and end times, and some send only a number of hours. Each record is evaluated on its own, based on the fields your HR tool provides:
What your HR tool sends | How it appears in Insightful |
A date range | One full-day entry (00:00–23:59) for every date in the range. |
A single date with a start time and an end time | The entry is placed exactly at those times. Nothing is assumed or filled in. |
A single date with a number of hours, but no start or end time | The entry starts at 09:00 and runs for that many hours. |
A single date marked as a full day, with no times or hours given | One full calendar day (00:00–23:59). |
A single date marked as a fraction of a day (for example, a half day) | A full day is treated as 8 hours, so the fraction is multiplied by 8. A half day becomes 4 hours, placed from 09:00 to 13:00. |
How the time zone is chosen
Insightful uses the employee's own time zone for a synced entry. If the employee does not have one, it falls back to your organization's time zone.
How time off types and categories are matched
Insightful has a fixed set of umbrella categories for time off. Each time off type name coming from your HR tool is matched against keywords to sort it into one of those categories.
Once a record has been matched to a category, Insightful creates a custom time off type under that category, using the same name your HR tool uses. This means you keep seeing the time off type names your team already recognizes, grouped under Insightful's categories.
Can synced time off be edited or deleted?
No. Time off that came from an HRIS integration is read-only, and it is labeled in the app so that it is clear it came from your HR rather than being entered by hand.
Adding time off manually or by CSV while sync is on
You can still add time off yourself, for example, to flag an unapproved absence, or import a CSV, such as a holiday calendar. There is one limit: you cannot add a manual or CSV entry for a date that already has a time off entry synced from the integration.
If it happens the other way around, and the integration later syncs time off for a date that already has a manual or CSV entry, the two entries coexist. The synced entry does not overwrite or remove the manual one, and you can delete the manual entry yourself if it is no longer needed.
Turning PTO sync off, and back on again
Turning off PTO sync, or the HRIS integration itself, does not remove anything. Time off that has already been synced stays in Insightful.
When you turn it back on, Insightful will not create duplicates of entries it has already synced. Entries it imported previously can be overwritten by the same integration when it syncs again.
Which HR tools support PTO sync
PTO sync is available for supported HRIS integrations. Where an HR tool does not hold time off data, the toggle appears but is disabled.
Okta, Entra, Google Workspace and JumpCloud are identity providers and do not contain any time off data, so there is nothing for PTO sync to pull from those.