Your time tracking data shouldn’t be stuck in one place. Hours feed payroll. Schedules feed staffing plans. New hires show up in your HR system long before they clock in for the first time.

That’s why we built the new Buddy Punch Developer API. It lets you connect your own software to Buddy Punch so you can read and manage employees, punches, time cards, schedules, time off and more, without anyone re-typing data from one system into another.

Whether you want to automate a nightly payroll sync, build a custom report your accounting team has been asking for, or push new hires straight from your HR platform, the Developer API gives you the building blocks to do it.

What is the Developer API?

Buddy Punch’s Developer API is a REST API that gives your software secure, programmatic access to your Buddy Punch account. It lives at api2.buddypunch.com and comes with an interactive developer portal where you can test every endpoint with your own key.

Here’s what you can work with:

Area	What you can do
Employees	List, create and update employees, including settings like time zone, punch permissions, and break rules. Read pay rates for one employee or everyone at once.
Punches and breaks	Punch employees in and out, add or edit punches, and start, end, or adjust breaks.
Time cards and pay periods	Pull hour summaries (regular, overtime, double-time, time off, and breaks), approve time cards, and update pay period status.
Time entries	Create, edit, and delete duration-based time entries.
Schedules and shifts	Create, update, and delete shifts, pull schedules by date range, and publish them to employees.
Time off	List requests, submit new ones, approve or reject them, and read accrual balances.
Account setup	Manage locations, department codes, positions, groups, and geofences.
Webhooks and events	Get notified in real time when something changes, and review delivery history.

If your team does something in the Buddy Punch web app every week, there’s a good chance you can now automate it through the API.

What you can build with it

A few ways teams are likely to put the Developer API to work:

• Onboard new hires automatically: When someone is added to your HR system, create them in Buddy Punch with their time zone, permissions and break rules already set. You can even skip the welcome email during a bulk import so dozens of employees aren’t notified at once.
• Sync approved hours to payroll: Pull time card summaries at the end of each pay period and send regular, overtime, and time off hours to your payroll or accounting tool.
• Build custom reports and dashboards: Combine Buddy Punch time data with sales, project, or job-costing data in your BI tool to see labor costs the way your business actually runs.
• Keep schedules in sync: Create shifts from your own planning tool, then publish the schedule so employees get notified — exactly as if you’d clicked “Publish” in the web app.
• React the moment something happens: Use webhooks to alert a manager when a time off request comes in, update a staffing board when someone punches in, or kick off a payroll run when a pay period is approved.

Built with developers in mind

If you’re the one writing the integration, here’s what you’ll appreciate:

• One key, one header: Every request authenticates with a single API key sent as a Bearer token. No juggling separate subscription keys and tokens.
• Scoped permissions: Each key gets read and/or write access per resource, so a reporting integration can read time cards without being able to change them.
• Real-time webhooks: Subscribe to more than 35 event types, from new punches and edited shifts to approved time off and closed pay periods. Deliveries are signed with HMAC-SHA256 and retried automatically if your endpoint is down, and you can send test pings or redeliver past events.
• Safe retries: Write requests support idempotency keys, so a retry after a network hiccup won’t create duplicate records.
• Predictable versioning: Pin a date-based version header, and your integration keeps working when newer versions ship. A public changelog tracks every change.
• Clear errors and pagination: Every error uses the same JSON shape with a request ID, and list endpoints use cursor-based pagination that stays stable as new data comes in.
• Docs you can try: The interactive reference lets you call endpoints from your browser, and code samples are ready to copy in curl, Node.js, Python and C#. The getting started guide takes you to your first authenticated request in about ten minutes.

How to get started

The Developer API is available on the Pro and Advanced plans, and only account administrators can create API keys. If you don’t see the Developer API in your settings, reach out to our support team and we’ll turn it on for you.

1. Log in to Buddy Punch as an Administrator and go to “Settings” → “Integrations.”
2. Find the Developer API card and click “Manage API Keys.”
3. Click “Create New API Key” and give it a clear name, like “Payroll Sync.”
4. Choose the permissions the key needs. You can grant read and/or write access to each resource, or select full access.
5. Copy your key right away and store it somewhere secure. For security, it’s shown only once.

From there, head to the developer portal for the getting started guide, full endpoint reference, and code samples.

A few tips to keep your data safe:

• Treat your API key like a password, and keep it in a secrets manager or environment variable rather than in shared code.
• Give each key only the permissions it needs.
• Use a separate key for each integration so you can revoke one without breaking the others.
• Revoke any key you no longer use, or that may have been exposed, and create a new one.

For step-by-step screenshots, see our help article: Getting Started with the Buddy Punch Developer API.

Already using our legacy API?

If you built an integration on our older API at api.buddypunch.com, it keeps working for now, but the new API is its permanent replacement. Moving over is mostly a matter of swapping your base URL and authentication:

• Create a new API key in Buddy Punch. Old subscription keys and tokens won’t work with the new API.
• Point your requests at api2.buddypunch.com.
• Replace your two old auth headers with a single Bearer token.
• Update a handful of multi-word paths (for example, /timecard becomes /timeCard) and read list results from the new data wrapper.

Our migration guide walks through every change with before-and-after code samples. You’ll also pick up a long list of endpoints the legacy API never had, including shifts, breaks, schedule publishing and bulk pay rates.

Start building today

The Buddy Punch Developer API puts your time tracking data to work wherever your team needs it, from payroll and HR to reporting and scheduling.

Already on a Pro or Advanced plan? Head to Settings → Integrations to create your first API key, then explore the developer portal. Not a Buddy Punch customer yet? Start a free trial and see how easy time tracking can be.

Questions? Our support team is happy to help at support@buddypunch.com.