Connecting Personio & DATEV: Automated BGM Metrics Instead of Excel

Why Manual Data Entry Is Your Biggest Time Sink

The monthly BGM analysis follows the same pattern at most HR teams: export absence data from the HR system, paste it into a spreadsheet, manually calculate the sick-leave rate, look up the turnover rate in another file, merge everything into a third file — and the result is still never quite current. According to a survey of HR managers at mid-sized companies, this manual process costs an average of four hours per month, error correction included.

The problem isn't a lack of will to analyze the data, it's the system architecture: the BGM tool and the HR system don't talk to each other. Yet all the relevant raw data is already available digitally — in Personio, DATEV HR, rexxHR, or Kombo. Integrating these systems is technically a solved problem, and the effort is a one-time, manageable investment.

Which Metrics Flow in Automatically

Once your HR system is connected to EasyBGM via API, the following metrics are synchronized automatically and are available without any manual export:

**Sick leave:** Number of sick days per employee and period, broken down by department, location, and employment type. EasyBGM calculates the rate from this and shows trends over twelve months.

**Turnover:** Hires and departures within the synchronization period. This automatically produces the adjusted turnover rate — split by voluntary departures and employer-initiated terminations, provided your HR system tracks that distinction.

**Headcount and age structure:** Active headcount by department, age group, and tenure. Especially useful for demographic BGM planning: Which age groups are disproportionately affected by sick leave? Where is there a risk of knowledge loss through retirement in five years?

**Types of absence:** Distinguishing sickness, vacation, parental leave, and other absences — relevant for separating genuine BGM action areas from seasonal effects.

Synchronization runs at configurable intervals (daily, weekly, or monthly) and can be limited to specific fields to keep the data transfer lean.

GDPR-Compliant Data Synchronization

HR data deserves particular protection — and that applies to aggregated metrics too, as soon as conclusions about individuals become possible. Three points are decisive for the integration:

**No personal data at the metric level:** EasyBGM receives and stores only aggregated values (sick-leave rate as a percentage, headcount per department). Individual illness data or employee IDs are neither transmitted nor stored. This is technically enforced, not just documented.

**Record of processing activities and data processing agreement:** The connection between the HR system and the BGM tool falls under data processing pursuant to Art. 28 GDPR. EasyBGM provides a standardized data processing agreement (DPA). This must be signed before the first synchronization — not as a formality, but because it binds you to specific deletion periods and access restrictions.

**Access and logging:** Only people with the BGM admin role can see the synchronized metrics. Every data retrieval is logged. Employees must be informed about the processing — typically via an addition to the privacy policy or the employee handbook, not through individual consent, since these are workplace-level analyses.