Guideline vs. OnPay

Guideline is well suited for a comprehensive 401k service to most any business, whether small (10 or fewer employees) or far larger businesses. They can help employees understand how to invest their money and provide options for them. An employee can allow the people at Guideline to invest their money based upon a simple algorithm of conservative/moderate/less moderate risk or the employee can invest as they choose. Guideline is probably not the best suited as far as the type of financial advice one might get from more established investments and financial groups.

Incentivized

OnPay works for me as a small business owner. It streamlines HR, Payroll and Employment Tax Filings - and it can be helpful in exploring benefit options with integrated partners. We run payroll for both of our companies through OnPay and haven't had any issues. The employees find it easy to use on their end, as well. The OnPay representatives are extremely proactive and communicate updates/changes in a very timely manner. If you have a substantial number of employees, it may be more efficient to look elsewhere due to cost.

Incentivized

• Administrate individual 401(k)
• Understand the contributions accumulated in total and per year
• Understand the percentage of salary being contributed per pay period.

Incentivized

• It is easy to add new employees.
• It is easy to inactivate employees who leave the company.
• All quarterly and annual reports are completed and filed on a timely basis.
• Employees have direct online access to their paycheck as well as their W-2.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• You can add additional additions or benefit items such as a car allowance. The process required me to contact a representative as that wasn't as easy to navigate.
• The process for handling additional withholdings for pre-payed taxes required support to ensure the calculations were accurate.
• Process for on-boarding is a little tricky if you don't start the process from the point of hire. You can add various things easily but it reflects differently in terms of completion of an Employee file.

We have used OnPay for a few years now and we do continue to renew our annual use of OnPay. We are only a small organization and although OnPay provides a lot of additional services that larger organizations might ind useful, OnPay still meets our limited requirements of running bi-weekly payroll and submitting our quarterly state and federal tax documents, and at a price that we still find affordable.

Incentivized

Well thought out and intuitive user experience for employees and administrators. Educational documentation has been a plus

Incentivized

For a one geography business in a larger metro area not planning to expand tax geographies or do anything other than the same-ol, same-ol, then I think OnPay is great. Their biggest issue is tax support responsiveness - it's simply unacceptable yet they seem to not be concerned about it at all.

OnPay immediately responds to any of my inquiries.

Incentivized

No complaints on OnPay's integration with Xero.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

They have always solved my problems and answered the questions I had. In the earlier years, they were much better and faster but in recent years there appears to be not as much people available so this results in more email requests.

Incentivized

Easy to implement and easy to convert any other payroll reports to the OnPay system when making the switch

Incentivized

We went with Guideline as it was more affordable than alternatives. I believe this ended up being a terrible mistake. Invest in a stronger 401k partner. Human Interest was the other provider we were considering. I don't know if closing an account would have been as complicated with other providers, but I certainly know the support would have been better and more transparent with a provider like Human Interest

Incentivized

OnPay is tremendously less expensive and technically superior to Quickbooks in my opinion. OnPay is less expensive and offered the ease of managing a restaurant payroll that was better in my opinion than When I Work. My experience when evaluating all of the payroll products that I felt the company could afford was that OnPay had a superior staff of professionals who knew their product and could explain how to use it most clearly.

Incentivized

OnPay works.

Incentivized

• Allow small employees to enhance benefit package
• Great recruitment tool for new employees
• Connection with payroll vendor allowed for less manual work

Incentivized

• Massive time savings. Wonderfully easy to use interface.
• I've loved the Chat feature. It's provided quick clear direction from your staff for me at times when it was needed.
• I've had very minimal worry about the tax filings and am grateful for that component of your automation.
• During the recession we experienced as a result of COVID19 I was particularly grateful we were able to have guidance from your team on how we needed to handle ERC credits. We did run into filing issues there, but were able to resolve them in the end.

Incentivized