Guideline headquartered in San Mateo offers a cloud-based 401k management software for businesses priced on a per employee basis.
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PlanSource
Score 7.9 out of 10
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PlanSource BenefitsOne is an employee benefits engagement platform, from PlanSource headquartered in Orlando, Florida. The solution presents streamlined workflows and real-time integrations, as well as a mobile-friendly enrollment experience that’s designed to maximize HR efficiency and plan adoption.
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.
Puts all of your healthcare selections in one place making changes, drops, and additions are taken care of in one place instead of having to contact every vendor individually.
Keeps an accurate record of real time enrollment which helps when you are in an account manager role and handling client questions concerning their health plans.
Provides tools to keep the client and yourself organized. Several Open Enrollment messaging tools and places to add any educational documents for the different health plans.
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 more advanced options, such as HCM, could have a slightly more user-friendly dashboard for users who are not daily computer users.
Needs to be easier to customize the homepage. Clients are always interested in adding in their own pictures, colors, welcome message position, etc.
Needs to have a function where the employer can send a document for the employee to sign, open and capture the employee's signature, send back to the employer and save in the employee file.
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.
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 have looked at GoCo, Kronos and Zenefits. I selected PlanSource because I felt it was the most customizable for a variety of clients across the board. The interface seemed functional but slightly professional looking than it competitors. PlanSource also seemed well established and that it was capable of handling my client needs.
Positive - Reduces time spent contacting vendors of enrollment changes. When you are dealing with several hundred employees and their dependents across several vendors that time starts to add up.
Positive - Point of value when trying to gain or up sell a client.
Negative - You do need to meet the minimum number of people on the platform as per your contact to avoid having to pay a fee to PlanSource. If one of your larger clients leaves that could be a potential issue.
