Guideline headquartered in San Mateo offers a cloud-based 401k management software for businesses priced on a per employee basis.
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Viventium Software
Score 9.3 out of 10
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Viventium Software, Inc. provides a cloud-based HCM solution that, according to the vendor, offers a remarkable user experience and design
that is enjoyable, personable, and intuitive, along with analytics and actionable insight into your business. Additionally, the vendor aims to provide exceptional HCM client service.
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 love it for health care. It does everything we need including auto pay, auto deductions, API's to incorporate with other software, and I can always find the info I need. If you're a super large company (big box store, major chain), you probably need more than Viventium can do. But I haven't run into a single thing yet that we need it to do that it can't. And since we've been with them, they've added new features so they're always improving it.
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.
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.
After 2 weeks of one-on-one phone calls with my "trainer" from ADP, I ran my first payroll by myself. They called me the next day and asked if I needed help and I said I THOUGHT I had done it ok. The trainer was floored. He actually said to me "NOBODY is ever able to run their first payroll on their own!" Doesn't that just say it all??? It was SO confusing. There was so much to navigate around and things that I did not understand. With Vivenium, they did a 60 minute walk through on video with me and I was ready to go. I had questions after that as I hit unique situations, but I had someone to call and email and I always got my questions answered. They would fix the issue for me AND tell me how to do it myself so that I could learn for the next time.
