Hilan: Getting Payroll and Attendance Data Out to Another System

Hilan runs payroll, attendance and HR on a single integrated database, which is exactly why exporting from it is a project rather than a setting. Hilan publishes no public API specification, so in practice data leaves through in-product exports, scheduled report deliveries, Hilan's own BI layer, or an interface the vendor builds under contract.

What Hilan actually is, and why that changes the export question

Hilan is a payroll and human-capital SaaS vendor and service bureau, listed on the Tel Aviv exchange, that also sells BPO services where its own staff operate payroll and attendance accounting for the customer. That last point matters more than any technical fact: in many organisations nobody internally has ever needed the underlying data, because the deliverable was always a payslip run and a set of reports.

Hilan's attendance pages describe collection from time clocks, landline reporting, mobile reporting and a web clock, with control and management reports combining attendance, payroll and HR data. They also describe analysis at organisation, population and individual-employee level, and a close connection to Hilan BI.

So when a finance or operations team asks to "connect Hilan to our system", one of three different things is usually meant:

• A number needs to appear on a dashboard that already exists elsewhere.
• Cost per project or per site has to be allocated into an ERP that Hilan does not hold.
• A downstream process - subcontractor billing, a grant report, a customer invoice - needs hours at a grain the payslip never carries.

Only the second and third are integration problems. The first is frequently answered inside Hilan's own reporting and BI layer for a fraction of the cost.

Does Hilan publish a public API?

No public API specification, developer portal, endpoint list or authentication guide for Hilan could be located. Hilan's public site is product and marketing material; its technical detail sits behind the customer relationship.

That is a statement about what is published, not a claim that no interface exists. Large SaaS payroll vendors in Israel routinely build customer-specific interfaces under a professional-services engagement. The practical consequences are what matter:

• You cannot design against a spec you have not been given. Any estimate produced before the layout is in hand is a guess.
• Ask for the interface definition as a document with a version, not as a sample file. Sample files drift and nobody notices until a field shifts.
• Ask explicitly who owns changes: if the vendor adds a column, whose ticket is it.
• Ask about the delivery mechanism separately from the content. A perfect layout delivered to a mailbox nobody monitors is still a broken interface.

The same discipline applies to any Israeli vendor without public documentation, and the general version of it is in what to do when the supplier has no API.

The four routes data takes out of Hilan

The row that gets chosen for the wrong reason is the first. It is free to start and it is the most expensive to run, because the cost is spread across twelve reconciliations a year rather than showing up as an invoice.

Which identifier do you join on?

Neither ת"ז nor the payroll employee number alone. An export that carries only one of them will eventually fail to join, and it fails silently.

The reason is that the same human being is keyed differently in each system in the chain:

• Payroll keys on an internal employee number that is unique per employing entity, not per person.
• Attendance and clock hardware key on a badge or clock number, which is reissued when a badge is replaced.
• HR and directory systems key on ת"ז, which is stable but is personal data and should not be spread across systems that do not need it.
• An ERP or project system usually keys on its own resource code, which nobody in payroll has ever seen.

The workable pattern is to carry a stable pair - employing entity plus payroll employee number - as the technical key, hold the ת"ז only where the process genuinely requires it, and maintain the mapping to the ERP resource code in one place with a named owner. Payroll data is personal data, so the fewer systems that hold the identity fields, the smaller the surface you have to manage.

What a report-shaped export costs you

A report is built for a human reader, and that shows up the moment a machine reads it:

• Subtotal and total rows sit inside the data, so a naive sum double-counts.
• Merged headers and a title block push the real header row down, and it moves when a filter description gets longer.
• Numbers arrive formatted - thousands separators, a minus sign after the digits, hours as 7:30 rather than 7.5.
• Hebrew column captions change wording between versions while meaning the same thing.
• A month with no data produces a file with headers and no rows, which is indistinguishable from a failed export unless you check.

If a report is the only route available, treat the parsing step as a real component with its own tests, not as a spreadsheet formula. The same failure pattern in a different system is described in exporting reports from WizCloud and WizCount.

What to settle with the vendor before anyone writes code

• The exact content: which fields, at which grain - per employee per month, per employee per day, or per employee per component.
• Whether retroactive corrections appear as adjustments in the current period or as restated history. This single answer determines whether your downstream store can be append-only.
• The file or transport mechanism, its schedule, and what happens on a failed run.
• The versioning rule and the notice period for a change.
• Who inside your organisation is allowed to receive the file, given that it carries salary and identity data.
• A test path with realistic volumes, not three rows.

Get those six in writing and the build is ordinary work. Skip them and you will discover each one during a month-end close. The wider version of this checklist is in the pre-integration checklist for data access and failure ownership.

Sources

• Attendance management - Hilan
• Payroll management - Hilan