Contacts

EdWard utilises the Decisively Contacts system to manage employee data, which underpins the creation of timesheets and other related processes. In this system, employee data is treated as “Contacts,” and it serves as the core repository for all information about employees.

Your employee data will be sourced directly from your existing HR or CRM solution. These systems will remain the source of truth for all employee-related information. EdWard acts as a consumer of this data, creating a copy for its processes and ensuring compliance with your business rules.

How data gets into EdWard

Initial Ingestion

When setting up EdWard, your employee data will be populated into the Decisively Contacts system. This is typically achieved via an integration process with your HR or CRM system, where the data is imported into EdWard for the first time.

During this phase, key employee details—such as name, role, employment type, and contact information—are pulled into Decisively’s architecture to create accurate employee profiles. This ensures that EdWard is aligned with your existing data and processes from day one.

Data Synchronisation

Once your employee data is initially populated, it will be synchronised with Decisively on an ongoing basis. This ensures that any updates or changes made in your HR or CRM system are reflected in EdWard without any manual intervention.

The synchronisation process ensures that EdWard remains up-to-date with your source data, enabling seamless and accurate timesheet management, entitlement calculations, and compliance tracking. It also provides real-time consistency across all data-driven workflows in the system.

Implementation Details

The exact implementation of the data into Decisively will differ depending on your corporate systems, integration middleware you have available, and whether you are using a dedicated, private or public version of Decisively.

At a high level the process will be

1. Review the data model created by Decisively. This provides the legislation/award/contract driven view of your actual data requirements. You will need to map any data that you have in your data holdings into this format for ingestion into Decisively
2. Call the Contacts service within EdWard with this data to create employee records. This is likely done as an initial one off batch, and then either updated based on your systems calling EdWard as employee data changes OR through the configuration of a monitoring solution on the EdWard side to capture these changes.

tip

Your integration with EdWard is recommended to use an API Key to manage the connection. Authentication using a JWT token could be supported, but would require your calling system to refresh the token every 15 minutes.

If you rely on EdWard calling your systems then you will need to provide a valid authentication process for Imminently to configure to connect to your systems or integration middleware