People Data & Roster Management

Last updated: April 20, 2026

How to keep your people data current in Span.

There are several ways to keep your people data up to date in Span:

  1. Integration with your HRIS, Okta, or SFTP. This is a good option for large or rapidly scaling organizations.

  2. Manually add people on the Admin > People Management page. This is a good option for smaller teams or teams with stable headcount.

  3. CSV Upload.

User Fields and how they operate in Span

  • Email

  • First Name

  • Last name

  • Member Type

    • Team Member: Team Members will show up in the Team hierarchy within the product. Users will default to Team Members when they are added to Span. Example: a VP Engineering who should show up on the org chart view, but does not need to be included in team based metrics reports.

    • Observer: Observers don't show up in the Team hierarchy. Example: a Finance person who is working on cost capitalization or other analytics but is not a member of the Engineering team.

  • Start date (used for Onboarding Reporting)

  • Code Contribution (we default to 'contributor' if you have Github username)

  • Version Control System username. Here are the different ways to get these usernames into Span:

    • Sync username from a field in your Okta, HRIS or SFTP integration. This is the preferred method.

    • Username is included on CSV file that is provided to Span team to upload

    • Managers update Github username manually when someone new joins the team

    • In the Admin > People management page in your settings, Span alerts you to potential missing or un-mapped GitHub usernames. Click on the "Data Quality Issues" alert on the top of this page, and confirm the suggested mappings.

  • Team

    • Team indicates what project team someone is on and shows up across Span's Team reporting pages. You can add someone team on their user profile, or from the Team Management Page

    • Cross-team members: while you can't be a member of multiple teams within the same hierarchy, you can be a member of multiple teams across different hierarchies. For example, if you a product leader and need to be a part of multiple parent level teams.

HRIS Integrations:

Span uses Kombo.dev as a third party integrations manager for all HRIS integrations.

Kombo is a subprocessor and is listed on our subprocessors page. As such, its use is governed by Span’s MSA/Terms of Use, including our DPA, which extends to all approved subprocessors.

Kombo's role is mapping data from a variety of sources into a common schema and keeping it up to date so that Span can sync from Kombo without having to maintain a large library of integrations.

You have full control over what data you sync in, and you can select this during the integration connection process.

Here is the process for ensuring that your data is correct:

  • Step 1: Decide what integration you are going to use (HRIS, Okta, etc.) Ensure that this system has all of the Span required fields.

  • Step 2: Create a Group in your system of record to contain all employees that you would like to sync to Span. Integrations rely on Groups to tell Span who you want to be synced.

  • Step 3: In you Span Integration settings, select the integration of choice. NOTE: it might take 10 minutes or so for your Groups to appear to select.

  • Step 4: The Span team does some data verification and QA to make sure that the Groups that are picked align with what you want. Once you select the groups you want to send to Span, let you Span contact know so that we can verify the data. Then, Span will "enable write" permissions on your integration to enable syncing the data to Span. This is a quality control step to ensure that everything is working as intended.

Our most common HRIS integrations are listed on our Settings > Integrations page, but we support many more integrations than are listed here, so just reach out to your Span contact and we can help you get started!

Things to note:

  • Each Span instance can only have one HRIS integrated at a time. If you have an HRIS connection, fields coming from the integration are not editable in the Team/People management UI.

  • Once you connect your HRIS integration, you must come back to Integrations page, and hit "connect." From here, select just the groups that you want in Span.

  • Users are never deleted in Span via upload or integration.

Okta (HRIS)

  • This option allows you to connect people fields in Okta to Span.

  • NOTE: This does not support SCIM provisioning.

  • You may also set up Okta as a Single Sign On (SSO) tool. Please see here for more information.

Google Workspace

  • Similar to Okta, you may connect to Google Workspace if this has the required people fields that you want to send to Span.

Syncing custom fields:

You can set up custom fields from your people data source so they are synced into Span. Some examples of custom fields include:

  • Front end vs. back end

  • Job Level

  • Location