Post: How to Push Completion Records from L&D Back to HRIS
Completion write-back is stage 5 of the 5-stage integration and the stage most-skipped. Build it and the HRIS becomes the single audit-ready source of compliance training records. Skip it and the L&D platform becomes a single point of failure for audit response.
Why write-back matters
Regulators and internal auditors ask for compliance training records on specific employees. They ask HRIS, not L&D. When the records do not live in HRIS, the audit conversation becomes an integration troubleshooting exercise. Read the HRIS + L&D API Integration — Complete 2026 Guide for the full architecture context.
Step 1 — Register the L&D completion webhook
Configure the L&D platform to post a webhook payload to a Make.com scenario on every completion event. The payload includes learner employee ID, course ID, completion date, score, and credential expiry date (if applicable). Validate the payload against the integration contract.
Step 2 — Validate the learner against HRIS
Before writing to HRIS, look up the learner by employee ID on the HRIS side. Confirm the employee is active or recently active (terminated within the last 30 days). Reject completions for non-existent employees to a quarantine queue for HRIS-side investigation rather than silently dropping them.
Step 3 — Deduplicate against existing completions
Read the employee’s existing learning history from HRIS. If the same course completion already exists for the same date, do not write a duplicate. This step prevents downstream confusion during audit when the same completion appears multiple times.
Step 4 — Write the completion record
Call the HRIS learning history write API with the validated, deduplicated payload. Include the course identifier, completion date, score, credential, and credential expiry. Use HTTP POST with sent_from and sent_to fields for audit traceability.
Step 5 — Add the hourly fallback job
Webhooks occasionally miss events. Build a separate scenario that runs hourly, queries L&D for completions in the last 90 minutes, and writes any completion not already in HRIS. The 90-minute overlap window prevents missed events from falling through during webhook delivery delays.
Step 6 — Build the daily reconciliation report
A daily scenario reads the L&D completion count for the prior day and the HRIS completion write count for the prior day. The two numbers match in steady state; any disagreement surfaces a drift in the integration. The report goes to an integration operations channel daily. The Make.com HRIS-L&D guide covers the broader reconciliation pattern.
Expert Take — write-back is the stage that survives audit
Teams build identity sync, push role data, declare the integration done, and skip write-back. Six months later, an auditor asks for compliance training records on a specific employee. HRIS does not have them. L&D has them but is down for maintenance. The audit fails on a fixable problem the integration was supposed to solve. Build write-back. The audit will come.
FAQ
What if the HRIS does not expose a learning history write API?
Use the custom employee field write endpoint to add a structured JSON record. The endpoint is less elegant but functionally equivalent.
How do you handle credential expiry?
The credential expiry date writes to HRIS along with the completion. A separate daily scenario reads expiry dates 30 days ahead and triggers re-enrollment in the L&D platform.
What is the typical write-back latency?
For webhook-driven write-back, 60 to 120 seconds from completion event to HRIS record write. For hourly fallback, 60 to 90 minutes. The identity sync build guide covers the latency targets for the identity stage.
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