Guideline

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.

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

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.

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.

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.