If you use an external tool for time tracking, you can import your employees’ premiums into Personio. Premiums are extra pay for work at special times, such as Sunday, night, or public holiday work.

You keep tracking and approving time in your own tool. Each month, you export your premiums from your tool and import them into Personio as a CSV or Excel file. The data then flows into Personio Payroll without manual entry, so you can use Personio Payroll without replacing your time tracking tool. Imported premium pay, such as overtime, night shift supplements, and on-call pay, appears on your employees’ payslips with the correct pay code names.

This is the monthly process:

1. Review and approve the time data in your tool.
2. Export the premiums from your tool.
3. Upload the file to Personio.
4. Review any validation conflicts.
5. Run payroll.

This feature is currently in beta and only available to selected customers. If you don’t see the Premiums import in your account, it isn’t available to you yet. What you see in the product might not match this article.

Before you start

Permissions

• To import premiums, you need Edit permissions for the Attendance > Import - external premiums section.
• For each employee you import premiums for, you also need:
  • Edit permissions for their Attendance > Attendance data section, and 
  • Edit permissions for their Salary and Compensation > Salary information section.

Other requirements

• Your organization is located in Germany and uses Personio Payroll. Support for other payroll integrations follows later.
• Your employees track their time in an external tool. Any tool works, as long as you can prepare the file in the Personio format described below.
• You need to create an Overtime and Premiums policy with a time category for each pay code you use. 
• We recommend that your employees have the same email address in your tool and in Personio. The same applies for their Personio Employee ID  (the number at the end of the URL for each employee profile). Personio uses these identifiers to match each row of the import file to an employee.
• If you use Personio Payroll, our Payroll Support maps each pay code to a payroll wage type. Contact our Payroll Support to request this.
• An employee’s time data comes from either Personio or your external tool, not both at once.

Set up time categories for import

Personio only accepts rows for time categories you've set up and assigned to employees in advance. Each time category matches one pay code from your time tracking tool.

1. Go to Settings.
2. In the Time off & attendance section, click Attendance.
3. Below Policies, click Overtime and Premiums.
4. In the top-right corner, click New overtime and premiums policy.
5. Add a name and description for your policy.
6. Under Select how overtime and premiums are determined, select Import from an external tool.
7. In the Time categories section, define the special hours you're planning to import. Fill in the fields described below. You can add more categories as needed.
8. Review and save your policy.
9. Assign the policy to the employees you want to import premiums for. 

Premium type fields

If you use Personio Payroll, send our Payroll Support the name of each premium type, whether it's a Sunday, night, or public holiday premium or another type, and which premium family it belongs to.

Prepare your import file

Personio reads premiums from one file format, whichever tool they come from. Your time tracking tool stays the system of record, and Personio receives the data for payroll. Each month, you approve your time data in your tool, export the premiums, and upload them to Personio before you run payroll.

How you create the file depends on your tool:

• Your tool’s provider offers an export in the Personio format. Export the file from your tool and check it against the table below. Ask your provider’s support team whether this is available.
• Your provider doesn’t offer one. You can still use your tool. Export your premium data in whatever format it offers, then prepare the file yourself in the Personio format. This can take more work, because you adapt your tool’s data to the Personio format.

Before you export, check that your tool uses the same employee identifier and the same pay codes as Personio:

• Employee identifier: Your tool uses the employee’s email address that they have in Personio. Alternatively, it uses the Personio Employee ID (the number at the end of the URL for each employee profile).
• Pay codes: Make sure that your Overtime and Premiums policy in Personio is set up to use the codes that your external tool uses.

To prepare your file, follow these steps:

1. Go to Settings.
2. In the Organization section, click Imports.
3. Select the upload type Premiums and download the Excel template.
4. Open the template and read the guidelines.
5. Fill out the template with your premium data, as shown in the table below. Note that each row is one premium for one employee.
6. Save the completed file.

Import the file

After you’ve prepared your file, upload it to Personio. Personio validates your data and shows a preview before anything is saved.

1. Go to Settings.
2. In the Organization section, click Imports.
3. Select the same upload type: Premiums.
4. Click Next and upload your completed template.
5. If needed, match the columns in your file to the corresponding attributes in Personio.
6. Click Next. Personio validates your data and shows a preview. Review any validation conflicts and fix them in the preview or in your file.
7. If the data is correct, click Import.

After the import, you can correct individual premiums directly in the employee’s timesheet. Learn how to correct imported premiums below. Every import is saved in the Personio Audit Log, both for the file and for each employee it changed.

Correct imported premiums

If you need to change a few premiums after the import, edit them directly in the employee’s Attendance tab. Don’t import a corrected file again. You can import the full file again, but we don’t recommend it for targeted corrections.

Understand limitations

• Imports are manual. You start each import yourself. Personio doesn’t sync automatically.
• Corrections are manual. Make targeted changes in Personio, as described above.
• API isn't available yet. You can only import premiums with a file.

Keep in mind

• Import other time data for Payroll: target hours, worked hours, and time off periods. Time off periods can be imported today. Imports of time off periods also trigger automatic eAU retrieval and let you edit additional payroll questions in bulk.
• If you import time off or target hours as well, your public holiday calendars in Personio must match those in your tool. A mismatch causes incorrect target hours and absence deductions.