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Use cases → Admin and governance

Sync group memberships from your HRIS automatically

Keep Google Workspace groups in sync with the HR system by driving changes through a delegated service account, eliminating manual updates and stale access.

Who it is forIT admins or operations teams responsible for access management and onboarding/offboarding.
APIsAdmin SDK
Typical scopesadmin.directory.group, admin.directory.group.member

The problem

Manual group updates fall out of sync with the HR system, leaving people with access they shouldn’t have or missing access they need. This creates security risks and support noise, especially when team changes are frequent.

How it works

  1. Pull the source of truth group membership from the HRIS export or API.
  2. Compare with current Workspace group membership via Admin SDK.
  3. Add or remove group members to match the HRIS, using idempotent operations.
  4. Log each change for audit and troubleshooting.

What changes

Google Workspace groups always reflect the HR system, so access is correct without tickets or manual intervention.

The trap in this one. Membership removals via Admin SDK can take several minutes to propagate, but additions often appear instantly. If you trigger downstream actions (like Drive permission changes) immediately after a sync, you can end up granting access to people who should have just lost it—because their removal hasn’t completed yet. Always design downstream steps to account for propagation lag, or you’ll introduce race conditions between access removal and resource updates.

Questions people ask

Do I need to handle nested groups?

If your HRIS models nested groups but Workspace groups are flat, you'll need to flatten the intended membership before syncing. The Admin SDK does not resolve nested memberships for you.

How often should the sync run?

Most teams run this daily or hourly. More frequent runs can reduce the window of stale access, but watch out for API quota limits if you have large groups.

Want this built?

This is a pattern we run in production. We will set up the delegation and build this on top of it — $500 per hour, most of it working the same day.

Talk to us Or read the setup guide

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