Guideline Reviews & Insights

They are my previous company’s 401K benefits provider

It has been 4 weeks since I’ve tried to extract my money from their account, and I still have not received. I’ve had to escalate the customer service ticket and I still have to stay on top of them. The money also is coming via check versus a simple account transfer because the customer service team closed my account prematurely, so it’s overall been an awful experience for me with a decent chunk of change. Very unsettling

Guideline helps us to easily administrate our 401(k).
It is not easy to have visibility on the total retirement savings that each individual has accumulated and in total.

It also helps to understand the amount contributed before and after taxes.
This is specially helpful to understand if an emergency withdrawal would be taxed or not taxed.

For example, at the start of the year, the software projects the total contributed per year before and after taxes.

I think that the good thing of it is that it is easy to follow up contributions and accumulated money for the retirement without the need to directly ask H.R. people. That saves HR resources.

On the other hand, portfolios are not easy to understand and select. The meaning of risk is not clear.
What is risk in this case?

We selected Guideline as our 401k provider and used the integration with Rippling (our payroll provider).

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.

The guideline is used for our 401k service for all our employees and all departments. It addresses the benefits package offered to employees as to their retirement. Some of the partners also use Guideline, making it a fairly comprehensive service. One problem every business faces is a retirement (if offered) program for their full-time employees.

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.

Guideline is administrating our company 401k plans. It's a fully automated system, connected to our payroll provider and allows my team to invest in their retirement, and allows my executive team to focus on other things besides plan administration. We're in an excellent position of "let it ride" where Guideline handles automated withdrawls, corporate matching, plan selection for our entire team.

So far, guideline had done just about everything perfectly. Plan setup was simple and quick, and the initial onboarding process was outstanding. In the rare instance we have needed some form of support, it has been quick and simple as well. Its generally obvious that the first tier of support has not been particularly well trained on the platform, however, despite this small hinderance they have been able to adequately address our requests.

Our entire organization uses Guideline for our 401k program and benefits management.

Is great for startups that need to offer competitive 401k and other benefits because rhe cost is reasonable and setup is effortless.

Guideline was mainly used because it connected with the company's prior payroll vendor Gusto. All employees at the company used Guideline for 401(k) services. We were looking to expand our benefits as a small employer at the time, and Guideline matched well at the time for the number of employees that we had.

Guideline is really only good if you are a small company looking to integrate it easily with your current payroll provider. It gives you the bare minimum 401k options, and I could see a growing company using them to start. However, other 401(k) vendors far out-class them between customer service, investment options, and employee financial options.

We use Guideline for our company-wide 401k platform. I go on to my account every paycheck and I love the simple to read interface to see how my retirement savings are doing. It is also seamless to adjust risk and strategy at the click of a button. The quarterly reports are a great way to track progress of my portfolio and fine tune my long-term financial strategy.

Guideline is the perfect 401k retirement platform for small businesses. The best thing about Guideline is its interface, as it is so easy to understand and use. I can't think of a scenario where Guideline would not be a great option for this use. The only thing I dislike about Guideline is that it is sometimes slow to process contributions from my paychecks, or at least confirm those contributions.

Fantastic 401K option for SMB Guideline has been a great choice for our small but fast growing software company. Our employees are savvy and appreciate the range of low costs index/ETF funds as well as the super easy to use interface. Features like real-time calculation of contribution limits when assessing contribution changes and super simple allocation changes have been specifically mentioned by the team. As the administrator, I really appreciate the continuous safe harbor analysis, seamless integration with Gusto (payroll), low and predictable costs and support that answers emails and phone calls in a timely and complete manner.

Guideline is an excellent tool for SMBs who want to offer a complete and low costs 401k option without administrative complexity. We are especially pleased with the integration to Gusto our payroll service. Employees appreciate the options for split contributions between Roth and conventional 401k accounts. Admins like the ease of use, complete feature list and low price.

We use it to maintain and process all employee retirement contributions. it does a great job of taking the manual part out of this process!

Appropriate for retirement benefits for all-sized companies! Not great if your employees need to be able to change their contribution and integrate with systems simultaneously.