Gusto

track time off

easily pay employees and contractors

easily hire

Not enough flexibility with pay periods. For monthly payrolls in WA state, I'm required to pay the 1st-24th of the month by the end of the month. To have payday be the last day of the month, the pay period sometimes ends on the 24th, sometimes the 25th, and February there is no option to be in compliance as it pays up to the 22nd only.

When an employee maxes their IRA contribution for the year, Gusto stops making employer contributions even though the company is required to pay a % of total income for the year, not only during pay periods in which the employee contributes.

Gusto was not including all reportable earnings to our state family medical leave program. This caused my employee to be denied benefits over her maternity leave. Thankfully she appealed their decision and after I provided payroll reports the PFML program identified the issue with Gusto's reporting and approved her payments. This all took several months though and Gusto still has not contacted my employee to apologize for their error despite me asking them to do so on a couple occasions (and it being the least they could do!)

A few years ago I started the process of having Gusto administer our health insurance benefits. The process was a nightmare and I ultimately decided not to have them do it, however without my signature they had already started changing it over.

Customer service is awful. It's almost not even worth sending an email since it takes months to get a reply and then they often don't address the problem but say "let us know if you need anything else" in which case you will wait another couple months for a reply if you even get one.

Graphic Interface is very cute and pleasant to look at it.

They make everything really simple.

Super intuitive to use.

The customer service is ridiculously slow.

The customer service is not always helpful.

The benefit administration is lacking in value.

Nothing

In my opinion, the support is terrible

From my experience, sales people disappear as soon as you are sold

Payroll and deductions

Benefits Management

Support

Communication

Follow-Up

New hire paperwork

Employee birthday reminders

Easy to navigate

Visually pleasing layout

Employee paycheck contributions to charities

Keeping all of my payroll documents in one place for easy access

Easy distribution of W-2s at year end

The integration of two businesses in one profile could be streamlined a little better. While it's not difficult to navigate between the two on a computer, it is difficult to do so from the mobile capacity

Reminding you on not just employee birthdays but employee work anniversaries would be really nice

Prompting for an including pronouns for new hire staff in the welcome email to existing staff would be much appreciated

Handles federal, state, and local tax withholdings

Easy onboarding of contractors and W-2 employees

Real-time access to paystubs and W-2s

Intuitive, natively online platform

Seamlessly integrated with QuickBooks Online

Some items take too many clicks to get to, like paystubs

I'd like to permanently skip some features I don't use, like sick time tracking

At times, reminders can become redundant

The self-service aspect of the software is very nice. We rarely need to get customer service involved.

For the first 2 years of our subscription to Gusto, customer service has been good when we needed it.

We have also had good experience with third parties recommended by Gusto including a 401(k) administrator, R&D tax credit analyst, and background check software.

Gusto has frequently updated its software and moved things around. It is frustrating to constantly hunt for things when they are not where they used to be.

Gusto just changed its subscription levels and though it remains to be seen exactly how this will affect us, it seems like the change is less service for more cost.

Gusto will make deposits to our bank account for refunds of various taxes but does not give any detail regarding exactly why we are receiving the deposits.

Manage and run payroll

Pay contractors

Provide employee benefits

Complete and file tax/compliance documents

Reporting is the weakest part of the platform and needs a lot of work, but it's serviceable as is.

More benefit options would be nice, but it's good as is

payroll reporting

workers comp reporting

employee sign-up

payroll processing

scaling back for just doing reporting

payroll is quick and easy.

Labor Dept reporting is automatic.

Workers comp is easy.

Turning off monthly payments if you want to pause payroll.

Onboarding is super easy for me and my employees.

Payroll is easy to enter.

Customer service is very quick and friendly.

Recently, they have let the ball drop a bit with submitting some state forms on time.

Other than this recent issues with timely forms, they have been great!

Easy Payroll Execution

Worry-free Tax Filing

Expandable

A little difficult to integrate with QuickBooks

Allow seasonal businesses to pause their accounts

Payroll Processing.

Customer Support.

Reporting

The website is occasionally slow, but this has improved over the last year plus that we've been using it

Providing payroll reports.

Connects to Turbo Tax for employee taxes.

Easy to input hours.

Multiple withdrawals for payroll, employee, and employer taxes.

QuickBooks integration would be nice.

It simplifies the payroll process so much, I cannot emphasize that enough.

They post reminders for onboarding in the hiring process also which is nice.

I have only used it a little over a year, so I have not identified any product gaps yet.

Payroll

Time Tracking

Onboarding

Benefits Tracking

GPS tracking for Time Tracking

Entering in Time Off Requests

Payroll

PTO Tracking.

Onboarding

Customer Support.

Quickbooks Integration.

Easy to use Payroll submission for employees.

Paying all payroll taxes and forms.

Easy to add new employees' info.

Some reports are a little harder to find exactly what you need.

Cannot easily adjust withholding taxes on specific payroll checks - need to contact support.

Customer Interface

Efficiency Processing Payroll

Timely File Payroll Tax Payments

All customer service functions are routed to people who cannot help

No dedicated Account Manager

4 to 6 day response time to emails

No direct contact to Customer Support

For me it was virtually impossible to reach a live person to discuss issues.

No last names, direct phone number, or phone extensions.

Zero sense of urgency.

Scheduled automatic payroll and deposits

Easy to use employee portal

Difficult to contact customer service. Website links go in a circle.

Site glitches that suggest products/services no longer available (Covid leave benefits).

Payroll

Benefits

PTO Tracking

Maternity leave benefits execution/tracking.

Contractor benefits.

Login functionality.

Easy for employees to upload their data

Simple payroll input and running payroll

Support Hours

Reporting

User interface

Support knowledge and training

Platform is fairly simple to use

Poor customer service. Today's issue was Gusto not depositing our payroll due to a Gusto system error, which they admitted. They will not do anything to resolve the issue. When we submitted payroll on time 2 days ago, their online system said that payroll had been submitted successfully. It showed a detailed list of how much each employee would get paid, the direct deposit amounts, etc. Today, on payday, our employees did not get paid. I logged into Gusto and it said that payroll had not been submitted. I reached out to Gusto customer service, and their response was: "Thanks for letting me know! We are currently having a system error. I checked with our engineering team and they said that they are actively working on a resolution to fix this. Our engineering team advised me to tell you that clear your cache & cookies as well, they are already on this and will be fixed sooner." So then I asked them to help me expedite payroll to get our employees paid sooner than 2 days, which is their standard. They said that expedited payroll can be processed in 2 days and there is nothing they can do. I have gone around and around with them for almost 2 hours, and they keep saying there is nothing they can do. They caused the problem, they admitted that they caused the problem, and they are refusing to fix it. Not paying your employees on time is a REALLY big problem, and Gusto is responding like this is the level of urgency of getting a FedEx package a day late for a shirt I purchased online. I am completely baffled. This is the 2nd time that Gusto customer service has been completely unhelpful in resolving the issue - this time, some of our employees may not be able to pay their bills on time.

Gusto bombards employers and employees with sales pitches for other non-payroll-related products.

Process Payroll

Onboard Employees

Support

Simple Interface

Clear communications

Tax Compliance issues take a long time to resolve

Reporting is not as simple as I would like and I can't save modified reports

Handles state/federal taxes for each user

Handles direct deposit

The website appears simple enough for users

The Gusto website often times won't load the page you want and will load the wrong page multiple times before it will finally work

Gusto won't allow anyone to manually input a clock out time in the future. It will only accept the current timestamp or a previous timestamp

Gusto sends out multiple annoying emails