Reconcile Employees
Learn how to reconcile employee profiles in Finch using PII such as full name and date of birth (DOB), email, or SSN.
If you have employees or contractors in your database that you need to match with Finch’s individual_ids, you will need a reliable method to reconcile the two. The following are two best practices for developers building with Finch.
Recommended: full name + date of birth
All payroll systems require at least a first and last name, therefore, finding a match by full name is a good way of reconciling individuals. However, on rare occasions, naming collisions do happen even within the same company. Therefore, we recommend using a concatenation of first_name, last_name, and dob, all data points available from the /individual endpoint.
Finch returns first_name, last_name, and dob for all systems we support. However, sometimes all the data points not inputted into the system by the payroll administrator of a company. We recommend confirming with your customer that the data points are inputted into the system for all employees before reconciliation.
Alternative: email address
Finch returns email addresses from the /individual endpoint. The uniqueness of emails, if they are returned by the underlying employment system, makes it a good data point to reconcile employees against.
Finch’s API does not always return emails. We find first_name, last_name, and dob are more consistent than emails.
Alternative: Social Security Number
Finch returns Social Security Number (SSN) of an individual, which can be helpful in identifying unique individuals. However, SSN is not returned by default since it is a sensitive field; you must enable SSN for your application first.
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