Introducing Rippling Business Partners

Published

Aug 17, 2022

Today, we’re introducing Rippling Business Partners. With this new feature, you can create relationships in Rippling between roles that sit in one department but support another—like an HR business partner who supports the Sales team—and give them the visibility and control they need to support their client groups more efficiently.

Where most HR systems break down

Most HR systems struggle to support business partners due to two key flaws: the inability to create and customize client groups, and inflexible permissioning systems. Without access to crucial employee data and app permissions, business partners don’t have visibility into the groups they support—they have to lean on VPs and department heads for time-intensive administrative tasks, like reporting and approvals.

These bottlenecks prevent business partners from being proactive, pull leaders away from their strategic work, and result in confusion over scope, data errors, and security concerns. And these issues only compound as you scale, because without addressing the underlying issues, hiring more G&A roles only ends up creating more busy work for a few key stakeholders.

Rippling gives business partners more visibility and control

Rippling solves these problems with Supergroups and Permissions. Because you can customize exactly which client groups business partners are responsible for and what data they can see, they’re free to act like the proactive, strategic partners they’re meant to be.

Quickly create and align client groups to any kind of partner

In Rippling, you can create any type of business partner—like HR, IT, Finance, and Recruiting; or even an office manager—in just a few clicks. Then, you can align them to a custom client group based on any employee attribute, like department, work location, level, or any other data in Rippling.

Create the perfect permission profile for every role

Business partners no longer have to worry about chasing down important employee information or wasting time relying on others to perform job-related tasks. Instead, you can give them access to only the tools and data they need—like critical employee information and reporting and app permissions. 

Thanks to Rippling’s role-based permissions, you can customize exactly:

  • Which apps and features partners need access to—like reporting, payroll, and time off
  • The types of data that partners can view and the actions they can take—from home address and tenure, to compensation and benefits information, to assigning LMS courses

Once you’ve assigned these permissions, Rippling automatically limits every business partner’s visibility and access based on their scope. For example, a business partner aligned to the Sales team could see payroll data for their client group, but not for employees on the Customer Support team. That way, partners can operate independently without seeing data they shouldn’t.

In addition, permission profiles in Rippling are inheritable. As business partners onboard, offboard, or transition roles, Rippling will automatically assign them both the scope and the permissions they need—so you don’t have to worry about creating the same profile over and over again, or wonder whether you’ve assigned the right permissions to new partners.

Streamline every business process

Once you’ve created a business partner, that relationship can be leveraged anywhere across Rippling. For example, you can:

  • Allow the Sales department’s HR business partner to run attrition reports for their client group only. They can proactively identify issues—like employee engagement and turnover trends—and start conversations with the department head
  • Notify the Marketing department’s IT admin when designers experience sustained high CPU usage, and let that admin provision new devices specifically for the Marketing department
  • Create policies that automatically route high-dollar Marketing department expenses for team offsites to the relevant Finance partner for approval

The result? More proactive business partners and less administrative busywork

With more visibility and control, your business partners can operate proactively instead of getting blocked by administrative bottlenecks—and they’re better equipped to support the departments, managers, and employees they’re responsible for. And when business partners can operate independently, people leaders are free to focus on the strategic work they were hired to do.

If you’re already a Rippling customer, you can create your first business partner in minutes. If not, and you’re interested in learning more, schedule a demo with our team today

last edited: March 26, 2024

The Author

The Rippling Team

Global HR, IT, and Finance know-how directly from the Rippling team.