Guideline vs. PeopleStrategy

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.

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PeopleStrategy is an excellent product if an organization is growing in the right direction and wants to improve HR processes. The software has many different packages depending on the need and can be purchased separately if something in addition is decided in the future. This is a benefit because not all organizations may need all features right away.

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

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• It was easy to navigate
• Easy to read
• Document upload was very easy and quick
• User Access was really easy to manager and reset passwords.

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• 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.

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• Certain functions cannot be integrated unless you have purchase that specific package

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

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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.

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A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info

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.

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ADP and Oracle are systems I have used and the GUI of Oracle even as antiquated as it is was vastly more efficient to work with than the people as well as system that PeopleStrategy claimed to be supporting. I didn't have any part in the selection of this system as it was in place before I was part of the team. We promptly began looking into all in one systems so that we could convert to a better experience for us as administrators and for the employees and their use. We ulitmatelt converted to ADP this year and even though the process was not as seemless as promised I would still take this process over using PeopleStrategy any time.

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

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• PeopleStrategy has reduced errors and paper waste
• Since using PeopleStrategy, we've maximized our time and streamlined processes
• Through PeopleStrategy's services, our business has increased employee retention

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Independently Invited by TrustRadius

A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info