Gusto -Easy to use but not perfect.
Overall Satisfaction with Gusto
We use Gusto to do our own company's payroll and we also use it to provide payroll services to our clients, some of whom basically use it to do their own payroll and simply consult with us if there are issues or they need help, and others whom we do the entire payroll process for.
- Gusto is very user-friendly in terms of employee onboarding - you simply enter some very basic information and the employee enters all of their personal details themselves.
- Running payroll is quite simple as well, it guides you every step of the way, and you also have the option to pause in your payroll processing and return to finish at a later time. And if you do make a mistake you can always cancel the payroll run and start over as long as you do it before the deadline.
- Setting up paid time off is quite simple and you can use Gusto not only to track paid time off but also for requesting and approving of time off as well.
- There is a 4-day lead time required for direct deposit which doesn't always work well for smaller companies who don't have a lot of cash flow and would prefer to keep the money in the bank until much closer to pay day. Also, if there is a bank holiday during that 4-day period then you have to run it 5 days ahead of time. I've had several clients who simply refused to consider Gusto as an option due to this as they can have a 2-day lead time with many other payroll companies.
- There have been several occasions when they have made a mistake in the payroll tax filings. When I first signed up with Gusto on behalf of a client (several years ago)they filed their local payroll taxes incorrectly for several periods in a row and I was told by the local tax agency that they did this not only with my client but several other companies as well. It took a long time to straighten this out, and they were not always prompt in their customer service response. Most recently they paid the state unemployment taxes a day late due to a "technical issue" - they say they are working to resolve the issue and will either get all penalties forgiven or cover them themselves - since this happened very recently I don't yet know the result of this one but they have been very pro-active on it so far.
- The payroll reporting could be a little more robust and accurate, especially the YTD reports. For example when running a payroll we always want a report that covers only that payroll as well as reports that cover the entire year to date, however, if you try to print the YTD report on the same day that you run the payroll, it does NOT include the payroll that you just ran because it hasn't happened yet, so you actually have to log back in 4 days later in order to get an accurate YTD report. Also, you can't run a report for only one employee - you have to cover all of them even if you only need the information on one of them.
- Gusto has decreased the time it takes me to run payroll by about 50% over my previous solution.
- My employees love the ease of onboarding, changing their personal information, and the cute emails they get when it's payday that not only tells them they've been paid but also congratulates them if they've received a raise or a bonus. They also love being able to log in any time (even if they've left the company) and pull up all of their historical paystubs and W-2s.
Using Gusto
3 - As the owner of the company I use Gusto to run our own payroll, as an accounting/bookkeeping company we also use Gusto to run payroll for clients so my staff also uses Gusto to process payroll for them.
1 - There are really no special skills needed as it is really quite user friendly.
- Internal payroll
- Client payroll