Handling payroll, benefits, and HR (Human Resources) as a business owner can be stressful and hard to achieve your company goals for your employees effectively. During my research, I stumbled upon a decent automated payroll software that can help you ease stress and allow for productivity. This software is called Gusto.
In this article, you shall decide whether or not to use the payroll software. This is the outline of the article:
- What is Gusto
- Features of Gusto
- How to Get Started with Gusto
- Pricing
- Pros and Cons
- FAQs
What is Gusto
Gusto is a company that helps your businesses handle its team or employees’ payroll, benefits, and Human Resources (HR) with ease and efficiency, making your business attractive, effective, and seamless in its day-to-day administration.
Gusto is an all-in-one cloud-based management software that works well for you if you own a freelancing team or agency, small or mid-size business, and want to make sure your employees are comfortable and enthusiastic to work.
Gusto has a user interface for admin and employees; thus, you should encourage your employees to register with Gusto to promote a seamless workflow in your company.
Your employees must be efficient and effective in carrying out their functions in your business because you want to have retentive and happy customers. The goal of your business is to retain and maintain a cordial relationship with your customers.
One of the factors that makes this goal achievable is by ensuring your employees and team appreciates the way you handle their payroll, benefits, and human resources as the business owner.
You don’t want your employees to transfer unpleasant attitudes to your customers due to how poorly you handle the payrolls, benefits, and human resources aspects of the business.
Also, this poor handling makes your enterprise to be poorly rated and you won’t be able to employ new workers, which can lead to the total closure of your business.
Because behind every successful business is a thriving team, Gusto’s cloud-based management software wouldn’t allow you to poorly handle your administration and ensure that your employees and customers are happy.
Features of Gusto
These features of Gusto are the services provided to you as a subscriber. Gusto has multiple features that assist and ease your admin function to keep your business up and running effectively. Gusto consists of the following features:
- Full-service payroll
- Employee benefits
- Time and attendance
- Hiring and onboarding
- Talent management
- Insight and reporting
1. Full-service payroll: Here, Gusto helps you save money by managing your filed taxes, tax credits, and compliance. This payroll feature is smart and easy to use. With this feature, Gusto makes it easy for you to integrate other platforms like Xero, TSheets, Clover, QuickBooks, and so on. Other functions of this feature include:
- Employees 1-9s and W-2s, and contractor 1099s are stored and organized online.
- Gusto saves you a lot of time by keeping track of changing tax laws and doing the calculations for you.
- Also, you can keep track of lunches and breaks with your hourly workers and ensure compliance with ease by syncing time tracking with payroll
- You can file local, state, and federal payroll taxes easily
- Gusto also provides a direct deposit function. Most customers love this function.
- Automatic tax calculator to calculate your payroll taxes
2. Employee benefits: As an all-in-one people platform, this feature supports your employee with affordable health and financial benefits to ensure the growth and development of your team of employees in the future.
The financial benefits here include:
- Gusto Wallet app that makes paycheck management smarter and encourages employees to save money.
- Automatic short-term savings built in to help your employees save on payday
- You can also offer your team and their families long-term saving account options like 401(k) retirement savings; life and disability insurance; easy and affordable college savings for your team.
- Workers’ compliance
- Paycheck splitter helps your employees with their budgeting and savings goals
The health benefits here include:
- Medical, dental, and vision administration
- Health insurance transfer at no additional cost
- Health saving account
- Trusted benefits advisors
3. Time and attendance: In this feature, tools are provided that automatically calculate, save, and track time which is synced with payroll. This feature consists of the following functions:
- Time tracking function to track when your employee logged in and out their hours. These hours are verified with geolocation.
- The project tracking function allows you to assign hours to projects and track productivity. Also, you can analyze workforce costs which are easily generated using trend analysis.
- You can customize your paid-time-off policies with just one click that would sync with payroll
- You can sync approved time off, key dates, and payroll reminders automatically with Google, Outlook, and iCal.
- Overtime alert
- Time off requests and approvals
4. Hiring and onboarding: This feature helps you to create an excellent and talented team. With this feature, you can hire, recruit, and onboard an incredible team, making them feel welcomed and supported from the start. Also, you can do the following:
- Create public job posts and personalized offer letters
- Customize onboarding checklist for new hires like benefits, payroll, and so on.
- Device management helps you and your team enroll your devices and keep data secure and control them remotely.
- You can sync leading applicant tracking systems with your Gusto account to combine workflows, easily view candidates, and import new hires into payroll.
- Document e-signing and storage
- Use the letter template provided by gusto to make your offers unique to your business brand
5. Talent management: This feature provides tools that would make your creative team more productive and efficient in performing their duty. These tools also encourage and nurture talented teams in your business, as well as simplify your HR tasks. This feature helps you to provide intra-development and cooperation with team members. Further, you can:
- Build a healthy culture of feedback and guidance because it increases the high performance of your employees
- Nurture your team’s growth
- Retain talented employees
- Use learning and development tools to improve your team’s performance
- Promote personalized employee communication
6. Insight and reporting: A tool with insight and reporting tool makes it easy for you to make decisions that will influence your business growth positively. Gusto’s insight and reporting feature make this decision-making process easy for you. Also, this feature will help you view your business and employee performance from a bird’s eye view. You can also use this feature to:
- Empower your team with surveys, custom reports, and good recommendations to help support your team.
- Analyze crucial data at a glance, make fast and accurate decisions, and save time.
- Understand workforce costs to improve on your bottom line.
- Uncover hidden task credits and save money
- Encourage proactiveness and compliance within your team.
- Access HR experts
- Automated tax credit identification
- Law and regulation alerts
How to get started with Gusto
Step 1: Go to Gusto’s website and click on sign up
Step 2: You would be required to input your name, email address, and password with some extra important information
Step 3: You will be asked some questions that would guide gusto in setting up your account, thus answer accordingly.
Step 4: You will be sent an email to confirm your email
Step 5: After confirmation, you would be guided to fill in some information about your company
Thus, some of the information you will be asked to fill in includes:
- Your company addresses
- Add your employees’ information to the following categories: Basic, Compensation, and Time Off. This information would be stored for you and your employees to easily access. Also, you can compose a warm welcome email for new hires.
- Your federal tax info
- Your state tax info
- Your company bank account so that wages, taxes, and monthly fees can be debited, afterward, your bank account is verified by Plaid and manually. There will be a box to tick if you want to perform the verification manually.
- Your pay schedule format. This part has two categories with common and advanced options; thus, you can choose from any of these categories the one that best suits your style.
- Report on the previous payroll so that gusto can calculate and report your taxes through the rest of the year accurately, making sure all employees are accounted for. If this information is not available you can move to the next field
- Sign document. This field is needed because you will be required to e-sign some documents later in your future use of this product, thus, fill in the required information.
- Verify bank account: Here your company bank account will be tested (through a quick debit and reversal test) to be assured that your account can be used to automatically pay your employees.
- Unpaid tax liabilities: add if there are any if not move on to the next field
- Select the industry that your company falls into. You can also manually fill in your industry if it isn’t listed.
- Discover apps: This is where you integrate other apps like Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, Stack, Zoom, Aplos, FreshBooks, Xero, and so on. This would make your workflow easy.
- Confirm plan: Then you would be asked to choose a plan that would suit your budget. For $39/month and above.
Pricing
Gusto provides a transparent and simple pricing system for full-service payroll, HR, and benefits. There are four subscription plans for you to choose from:
- Core plan
- Complete plan
- Concierge plan
- Select plan
- Contract
1. Core Plan: This plan is priced at $39/month plus $6/month per employee. It is suitable for freelancers and small businesses. In this plan, you have access to all the full-service payroll features except the next-day direct deposit. Also, you won’t have access to some features like:
- Customizable admin permissions
- Manager permission features
- Premium hiring and onboarding tools
- Time management tools
- Employee directory
- Employee surveys
- Certified HR Pros
- HR resource center
- Dedicated Support
2. Complete plan (recommended): This plan is priced at $39/month plus $12 per employee. This plan is good for businesses with complex hiring, payroll, and team management needs. In this plan, you have access to all the features in the core plan and most of the features core plans don’t have access to except a few. Now, these few are:
- Certified HR Pros
- HR resource center
- Dedicated Support
3. Concierge plan: from the name of this plan, gusto provides full service and features to you when subscribing to this plan. This plan is priced at $149/month plus $12/month per employee. Also, with this plan, you would have access to all the features Gusto has to offer. This is also suitable for businesses with sophisticated HR, policy, and compliance needs. Adding to this, this plan comes with a compliance alert to ensure that you’re updated to date on any change of law affecting your business.
4. Select plan: In this plan, you would have to contact sales for pricing. This plan is for growing businesses that need premium tools and dedicated support. Also, the minimum number of employees for this plan is 25.
5. Contract: this plan is for businesses without W-2 employees. This is priced at $0/month plus $6/month per employee.
Pros and cons
All that glitters are not gold. Let’s assess the pros and cons of gusto service.
Pros
- No extra fee charges if you need to pay taxes in multiple states
- Value for money
- Enough tools and resources to help new and existing HR managers to develop and maintain a talented and developed team.
- A good starting point for new businesses
- Easy to use
- Encourage short- and long-term service for you and your employees
Cons
- No mobile app
- Often experience slow loading of some screens
FAQs
Can I upgrade and downgrade my subscription plan?
Yes! you can upgrade to any plan of your choice and budget. Gusto will always provide you with services according to your current subscription.
I’m new to HR, can I use Gusto?
Yes! you can. Gusto provides you with excellent tools to start your journey. Also, Gusto guides you thoroughly during your signing up to ensure that you don’t make mistakes in your career.
How supportive is Gusto to their customers?
Gusto supports you with forums, email/help desk, phone support, FAQs/forums, chat, and so on
Is gusto a good choice for my business?
Yes! It is because you are provided with a subscription plan that would help up-and-coming businesses to grow and develop. Also, its integration feature makes it easy for you to use in carrying out your business plans. Adding to this, Gusto encourages a healthy saving habit for your business in general.
What kind of business is gusto suitable for?
Gusto is suitable for freelancers, and small and mid-size business owners. It is not suitable for large enterprises.
