Engage your employees
Boost plan participation and interaction
Improve the data exchange between your HR platform and EquatePlus
As an HR professional, you know that when managing sensitive employee information, you must get it right – there is no room for mistakes. But if you’re dealing with multiple uploads and large volumes of data, any manual intervention can create errors that need to be corrected, a time-consuming process.
EquateAPI, available with EquatePlus, automates the data exchange between systems, making the process more efficient and saving you time.
What is an API?
API stands for Application Programming Interface, a set of definitions and protocols for building and integrating application software. API is the market standard for data exchange allowing your IT systems — like your HR platform and EquatePlus to communicate with each other.
EquateAPI offers numerous improvements to your daily HR data management:
- Automation reduces workload and increases efficiency
- Saves time compared to manual data uploads
- Real-time data exchange and instant status notification reducing employee queries
- Keeps participant data secure and accurate, reducing errors and operational risks
- Offers state-of-the-art technology aligned with your HR system capabilities
What is EquateAPI?
EquateAPI is a partner API exposed by EquatePlus and supports real-time data loads of participant information. As an alternative to the SFTP filebased data exchange, EquateAPI is a vastly improved solution for HR system integration. No matter which HR platform your company uses, EquateAPI will allow it to communicate better with EquatePlus.
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Technical Overview
Load participant data
EquateAPI exposes endpoints to load participant core data (names, birth date, location, etc .), addresses (work, home and other address types), contact information (emails, phone numbers), corporate information (generic data for special handling), participant organisations (assignments to organisational structures), and participant preferences (language, currency, etc.).
Bi-directional
API communication is always bi-directional. If you are calling the EquateAPI you will get an instant response back. Validation issues or load status can be returned without delay using callbacks or inquired by the client system in a polling approach.
Load if valid
No matter how much data is loaded, valid data objects go to EquatePlus. Invalid data objects are rejected with a clear and meaningful error message. Unlike with CDI (Corporate Data Interface) or SFTP (Secure File Transfer Protocol) interfaces with API there are no rejects of complete data files or data sets.
Individual attribute updates
Using clearly defined semantics, EquateAPI allows for the selective update or deletion of specific data fields. There is no more uncertainty if sending a null value will delete the target field or do nothing. The ambiguous behaviour of file-and record-based systems is eliminated.
Extensive data validation
EquateAPI temporarily stores submitted data for sanitizing and validating in an isolated area. Only validated data objects are loaded to EquatePlus. Objects that fail the validation are reported back with clear error messages.
JSON data
The standardised JSON (JavaScript Data Notation) data format language is readable by many systems and is supported by many Software Development Kits (SDKs). JSON is also readable and meaningful to humans.
UTF-8 / Unicode
EquateAPI can accept UTF-8 (UCS Transformation Format 8) data from modern HR systems without the need to re-encode to ISO 8859-1. Future Unicode extensions of EquatePlus will be seamlessly supported. UTF-8 supports non-Latin characters such as Chinese 城 市. However, to prevent issues with the underlying systems and processes, data containing characters not representable in the ISO 8859-1 range will be rejected.
No more file sequencing
EquatePlus uses data objects that are “structured”. Related data objects are kept together and prevent issues such as loading an address for a non-existent participant.
Real-time data exchange
Client system requests are acknowledged with an immediate response. Data validation and post processing may take longer, but data loads are completed within a few minutes.
Batch processing possible
A single EquateAPI request can contain 1..n data objects. For best performance, an upper limit of 100 data objects is recommended.
Approval step / validation mode
If instructed, data loads can be stopped after validation. This enables clients to implement features like “validation-only” or “load-approval” in their data load workflow.
Payload encryption
In addition to the Transport Layer Security (TLS), payload data can be encrypted with industry standard method Pretty Good Privacy (PGP). This adds enhanced safekeeping of sensitive data traveling through large client infrastructures.
Key specifications
API type: Partner API
Protocol: HTTPS / RESTful
Method: Client initiated request / response with optional call-backs
Message format: JSON
Character encoding: UTF-8
Accepted character set: ISO 8859-1
Authentication: X.509 certificates / mTLS
API specification: OpenAPI 3 / YAML
Payload encryption: PGP
Data scope: Participants