Guideline headquartered in San Mateo offers a cloud-based 401k management software for businesses priced on a per employee basis.
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Netchex
Score 8.6 out of 10
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Netchex is a HR, payroll, and tax administration software platform with solutions dedicated to recruitment, hiring, and onboarding as well as payroll, tax compliance, HR, time/attendance, benefits management, and analytics for these areas.
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.
Netchex is great if you want to log in to one place to take care of all things employee-related. It is especially helpful if you have multiple locations or divisions as you can easily set these up and manage them as needed. The more employees you have, the more you will benefit from a program like Netchex that provides so much support for your business. Our company has multiple locations of stores and many employee position levels and Netchex has been great at keeping all of this simple when a lessor product could make it much more complicated. Netchex would not be as appropriate if you have a very small business or a simple payroll structure. It would definitely still work well for you, it would just be more sophisticated than you would require.
My Netchex Service Team is very responsive and friendly. They are willing and able to spend the amount of time needed on one call to troubleshoot most problems or answer questions.
Their recent updates to the employee dashboard have been well-received by our seasonal team. Employees are able to quickly find what they are looking for which has minimized the amount of requests that my team receives regarding questions on pay or updating personal information.
Online W-2 forms have been a game-changer for us since moving to Netchex. Our staff tend to move around a lot and most do not get the mailed copy of their W-2. The electronic consent has saved me hours and hours of time.
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.
SOME CUST SVC REPS MAY NEED ADDITIONAL TRAINING ON WORK AROUNDS
WOULD PREFER TO CHAT WITH SOMEONE, SOMETIMES WORDS IN TEXT COULD BE MISINTERPRETED. ALSO SPEAKING TO SOMEONE IS ALWAYS A POSITIVE
NOT REALLY ANYTHING ELSE BUT HAVE BEEN USING THEM 3 MONTHS SO NOT LONG INTO IT.....VERY EASY SYSTEM AND LOVE I CAN DO A NEGATIVE INSTEAD OF HAVING TO CALL AND ASK THEM TO DO IT ON THEIR END.
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.
The first line CE team is phenomenal. They are helpful, friendly, and knowledgeable. We have had less luck with the responsiveness of the tax department. However, their response time has improved drastically over the past year.
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.
I like that they are not so big that they ignore the small customers. They are also reasonably priced. Their support is excellent, I had worked with ADP in a prior position, and we did not have the same kind of support
Associates can easily access their data and make changes to things like their address and direct deposit, saving manager time to focus on more critical tasks within the organization
NetRecruitier has one site that can be posted to multiple job boards with one applicant tracking system
Electronic Onboarding allows us to get information out to the new employee so we can start with expectations on their first day and they know what to expect.
