Ease (formerly EaseCentral) is an online employee benefits administration platform, emphasizing paper-free registration and engaging progression through stages of registration that are easy for the user, as well as full visibility of registration completion progress, and other features as well (e.g. onboarding assistance, integration with popular payroll platforms, compliance with full reporting, and integrated HRIS functions like time off requests).
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Guideline
Score 8.1 out of 10
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Guideline headquartered in San Mateo offers a cloud-based 401k management software for businesses priced on a per employee basis.
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Pricing
Ease
Guideline
Editions & Modules
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Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Ease
Guideline
Free Trial
No
No
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
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More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Ease
Guideline
Features
Ease
Guideline
401(k)
Comparison of 401(k) features of Product A and Product B
Best for companies with payroll that take 360 integration with Ease. Great for an employee base that uses technology easily, but less great for employees who don't use technology well. You're able to input answers for employees which is helpful, but takes more work for the admin. The biggest benefit is the integration.
I believe that the only thing more broken than Guideline's product is their customer support. From initial contribution dates to the disastrous account closure that cost us personally thousands of dollars, this has been by far the worst SaaS and customer experience I've ever had in my career. If only 1) Guideline's product or 2) customer support had individually been broken, we would not have ended up in this state. I sent dozens and dozens of emails inquiring about oddities I was seeing in the product, but Guideline's reps only gave more conflicting and what ended up being grossly inaccurate feedback and status updates. I hope this review reaches anyone who is thinking of closing their Guideline account. Be extremely wary of what Guideline says and does in the account closure process and exact for detailed and exact timelines (you'll have to follow up many times...). For those of you who haven't yet selected a 401k provider, I'd recommend staying as far away from Guideline as possible.
I feel that the customer support was abysmal - In my experience, we were consistently given conflicting advice and statuses as we closed our account with Guideline. Despite many, many follow-ups attempting to clarify our current status and remaining steps to close the account, Guideline's reps continued to provide, I believe, misleading and inaccurate steps. This cost us thousands and thousands of dollars given Guideline was not able to appropriately pull the funds before closing the account.
Guideline's integrations - I believe there is clearly a broken pipeline between Guideline and Rippling. In my experience, contributions were not funded as expected when we first opened the account, and when we closed our account, there was no communication between Guideline and Rippling. Guideline continued to expect contributions into perpetuity despite closure of the account
I feel that Guideline's product itself is just broken in critical places - most importantly, statuses of contributions were reflected incorrectly in the software (Guideline thought funds were transferred, but they were not and Guideline never attempted to pull the funds from our bank). This, combined with the terrible customer support, cost us thousands and thousands of dollars after we closed our account. There are many absolutely critical features that are broken -> to give just one of many examples, it was not possible to update the bank account information and no error message was thrown. I was told that our account ended up in an exceptional state given our last payroll contribution date and account closure, but these seem like very basic things a 401k provider has to get right if there are going to manage people's money.
The few questions that we've had have been answered quickly and helpfully. The implementation was a breeze and the onboarding contacts were really helpful. There was some stuff I had to learn about 401(k)s in making the decision to implement Guideline, but the Guideline team was helpful in pointing me in the right direction.
My general agency Warner Pacific recommended EaseCentral and I checked it out. Seemed like a great fit and well worth the investment. I know other colleagues that use and are happy with Employer Navigator and some of the other ones. I have not checked out many other options because Warner Pacific did all that research and work for me. 2 thumbs up for EaseCentral
We selected Guideline due to their relationship with Gusto, our payroll service. However, we did review alternative options for our 401k program and found them very competitive as to price and quality. We were thinking about going with one of the bigger companies like Schwab, E*TRADE, Ally, etc., but found Guideline to be the best choice for us based on price and ease of use.
