Gusto – Review 2020 – PCMag India

Gusto, still relatively young in a crowded field of established payroll services, stands out in a number of ways. It provides a smart set of commonly used payroll tools for small businesses, and distinguishes itself with an exceptional user experience sporting a clean, easy-to-use interface and an intuitive navigation scheme. Those are critical attributes for payroll—a decidedly complex and time-consuming job. Gusto has steadily improved, adding new functionality in areas like contractor payments, benefits, and user experience. It continues to provide excellent support for the complicated tasks it enables.

Gusto wins an Editors’ Choice for small business payroll services once again this year, as does OnPay. We like both for a variety of small business types. They both offer terrific user experiences and an exceptional blend of both payroll and HR features.

Gusto Pricing and Plans

Gusto now offers a four-tier pricing scheme. The least expensive is Gusto Contractor, which offers unlimited contractor payments for $6 per person per month (no base price); with this plan Gusto handles 1099 creation and filing. We reviewed the Core plan again this year ($39 per month, plus $6 per employee per month), which focuses primarily on payroll processing. Complete ($39 per month, plus $12 per employee) adds HR tools, including impressive new hiring and onboarding tools. The top Concierge level ($149 per month, plus $12 per employee) makes certified HR pros and dedicated support associates available to subscribers. The three upper-tier account levels now offer integrated time tracking through TSheets. 

Gusto Core is comparable with most of the competition in terms of price, though Patriot Software is much cheaper, offering a Basic version for $10 per month, plus $4 per month per employee or contractor (you have to submit your own payroll taxes and filings). QuickBooks Payroll ranges from $45 to $125 per month plus employee fees. Its top level isn’t as expensive as Gusto’s, though Gusto is less expensive at the Core level.

Simplified Setup With Gusto

Setting up a payroll application is complicated, and 100 percent accuracy is critical. Your first run will not be correct if you’ve made even a small error. Like most of its competitors, Gusto walks you through this task, prompting you on what’s needed and supporting you with detailed help files and demos. It uses a multistep wizard to do so, much as OnPay and other competitors do. Unlimited chat, email, and phone support are available should you need help.

You first add your company’s name and address and then enter the preliminary information for each employee’s record. You can provide all the necessary information here or click a button to send employees an email that lets them complete part of the process themselves. This optional employee self-onboarding is becoming more typical of cloud-based payroll, and it saves time for the administrator. 

When both employee and employer have completed their portions of the employee records, the result is impressive. Records are split into six sections divided by labeled tabs. Job & Pay displays employment details like status, compensation, payment methods, and taxes. Garnishments and custom deductions also appear here, as do links to pay stubs. The Personal screen contains data like social security number, birthday, address, and emergency contact. Click the Time Off tab, and you’ll see related requests and policies, as well as a tracking history. The Documents screen contains a list of HR forms the employee has completed and signed. You can add and view Benefits by clicking on that tab and keep private notes under the Notes tab.

Since Gusto will eventually calculate and submit your payroll filings and taxes, you have to supply some related information during setup, including your legal name, Employer Identification Number (EIN), business type, federal deposit schedule, and the form you use when you file income taxes. Next, you supply any data needed for your state(s), such as the State Unemployment Insurance Rate (SUI). Providing state tax details can be an especially complicated process, so Gusto adds helpful explanations and links to help for this section.

The site then helps you create and test a link to your bank account (submitted using a company signatory’s name and approval) and select a payroll schedule (which determines how often payroll is run and when). Gusto limits you to four of the latter, two salaried and two hourly (though you can run off-cycle payrolls, something all the services we reviewed allow). Other services, including OnPay, are more flexible, letting you run payroll whenever you want and set up multiple pay schedules for different employees. 

As you continue on through the setup wizard, you’re also asked to sign required documents and set up workers’ comp. Gusto provides estimates to help you choose a plan, and then automatically sends payments each period based on your payroll. All payroll services require this documentation, but they may ask for it at different points in setup and in different ways. The final step in the setup wizard involves selecting the right Gusto plan for your business.

If you’re starting fresh with Gusto, you’re just about done with setup at this point. But if you’re switching from an existing payroll method or application, you have to provide your payroll history so that your records are comprehensive. You need to have the last pay stub for each quarter of the previous year, plus all pay stubs for the current quarter. Gusto simplifies this through its exceptionally friendly user interface and by offering free assistance from company specialists. Every competing service we’ve reviewed also offers such support, and they all request similar standard data from you. 

You also have to enter unpaid tax liabilities. There will be additional setup for benefits administration, and additional deductions and garnishments, as well as recurring reimbursements (travel expenses, phone charges, and others are supported). Again, these are standard elements that almost every competing application includes. The main difference lies in their execution, and Gusto’s is excellent.

Benefits Administration

Benefits administration (BA) is standard on all of the payroll websites we’ve reviewed, but some sites go farther than others in this area. Gusto is one of them. If your company has existing benefits providers, you can transfer their management to Gusto, which simplifies payroll deductions and eliminates the need to use multiple platforms and support teams. Or you can let Gusto help you choose the best plan for your needs. 

Gusto supports a greater variety of benefits than any other product I reviewed. Of course it offers standard retirement plans as well as medical, dental, vision, life insurance, and disability coverage. But the site goes well beyond that, covering everything from commuter benefits to charity matching to gym & fitness to cell phones. You can even set up custom benefits. And employees can get advances on their paychecks through the company’s Cashout program (not available in all states yet). Individuals can request up to 40 percent of their estimated net wages for the next pay period and get the cash as soon as the next day. The funds are then deducted from the next paycheck.  

Gusto’s BA portal also offers solid self-service functionality, which lets employees choose their own health plans, add dependents, and schedule plan changes based on upcoming life events, all without involving the company’s HR department. An unusual benefits feature is the availability of lifetime employee accounts, which let employees access account information even after leaving or being terminated from their current company. OnPay also offers this, but most others don’t. 

Payroll Processing With Gusto

Processing the payroll is the easy part for all of the services I reviewed this year—it’s the setup and ongoing maintenance of pay items and employee information that’s hard. Depending on how many employees you have, the benefits you offer, and how much historical data you have to enter, setup work can take anywhere from about 45 minutes to several hours, assuming you have all of the necessary information ready to go when you begin.

Your dashboard is the best place to go once you’ve completed setup. It displays three types of information that apply to your specific situation. There’s a to-do list, which suggests that you might want to complete other areas of setup, such as approving time-off requests and inviting your accountant or other team members to access the site. Other reminders appear on the dashboard, too, like the due date for your next payroll run. Upcoming employee celebrations are listed, too. SurePayroll is better at this overview; its more-mature dashboard is more customizable, interactive, and informative.

Running your payroll should only take a few minutes. Besides a regular payroll, you can initiate a bonus, off-cycle, dismissal, or missing payroll run. If you’re just running a standard payroll, Gusto displays an employee list that includes the annual salary or hourly rate for each. You enter any regular and overtime hours and then any additional pay items necessary—commission, bonus, reimbursement, and other earnings (such as paycheck tips, cash tips, or correction payments). You enter some of these directly on this page, but you have to open a new window for others (you can add these earnings types to employees’ records so that they appear on the payroll screen by default). You can also toggle between direct deposit and paper checks, and you can write a personal note if you wish. If you’re unsure of anything, save your data and come back to it later. Only SurePayroll offers a similar ability to save and come back to a payroll run later.

A second screen is required for recording time off; many competitors handle this on the same screen as other pay items, which is slightly more convenient. If you have pending time-off requests, Gusto reminds you and lets you approve them first. You can also enter COVID-19 public health emergency leave hours here. The Time Off page displays how many sick and PTO hours each individual has remaining, based on the policies that Gusto helps you establish.

After you’ve saved the data on those two screens, Gusto calculates your payroll run and displays a terrific preview outlining what’s about to happen. You can see the total payroll along with the debit amount and date. The tables below this information display lists of what gets taxed and debited, employee earnings and take-home pay, and your company contributions. You can open a huge, all-encompassing table of that payroll run’s data, which you can downloaded as a CVS or PDF file. This is the best payroll preview page I’ve seen among the sites I’ve reviewed.

All the services I reviewed handle the actual payroll process very well, minimizing the number of pages you must visit to enter the details of the run and clearly stating how much money is about to be removed from your bank account. Some are better than others, of course, but Gusto’s is among the best.

You pay contractors separately, using a similar wizard-like tool. Gusto has made several improvements to its contractor support in the latest version. For one thing, the service will soon pay contractors within two days instead of the current four. The site now supports time tracking for contractors, and you can sign up for a contractor-only subscription if you’re not ready to hire full-time employees yet.

Gusto Taxes and Integration

Most payroll services calculate taxes due and submit them, though Patriot Software offers a low-cost subscription level ($10 per month) that doesn’t include automatic submission of filings and payment (though it does the calculations). This is a tremendous service, since calculating and tracking payroll taxes is a Herculean task, one which can easily contain errors. Gusto prepares both W-2s and 1099s at no extra charge. 

Your run is now complete, but it’s not too late to cancel it and start over if you need to. This is not an option with all competitors; SurePayroll, for one, offers it. Automated payroll is becoming more common on these sites, and Gusto offers it. If you have only salaried employees who use direct deposit (or hourly workers with default hours per pay period) and you’ve already run the desired payroll once, Gusto will just handle it for you. 

The final step is to import your payroll data into an accounting application, if you use one. Gusto facilitates integration with some of the most popular invoicing and accounting solutions, including top choices FreshBooks, QuickBooks Online, and Xero. SurePayroll offers more (and more varied) options, however.

The Gusto User Experience

For some reason, Gusto displays a cute little pig (piggy bank?) surrounded by butterflies (wearing sunglasses and a little umbrella) while many screens are loading. The pig is running fast, but the pages don’t load as fast as he runs in many cases. I waited over a minute for a payroll report. It does distract you from the delay, however.

But that’s about the only criticism I have of Gusto’s user experience. Payroll is no one’s favorite accounting task, and anything you can do to make the user experience more pleasant is welcome. Gusto offers the best user interface and navigation system of any service I’ve reviewed. Its use of space and choice of fonts, graphics, color, and overall design are exceptional.

Reports and Mobile

Once you’ve finished your payroll, you’ll want to be able to look over it and analyze the data. That’s where reports come in. You can view them directly on the screen or download them as a CSV or PDF (in some cases, you can only download them, not just see them on the screen within Gusto). The site includes a good set of report templates, both in the area of payroll itself (like the Payroll Protection Program Loan, Agency Payments, Employee Summary) and HR (such as Benefits Report and Time Off Requests). There’s also a report for the custom fields you’ve created. Gusto does a great job of allowing you to easily customize many of its reports by a variety of filters. 

Gusto is easily accessible through a mobile web browser; there’s no separate app. It looks and works very much like the full desktop version. The app opens to your dashboard, and a link opens the site’s menu, which is exactly the same as the desktop version’s. The working screens of both the Android and iOS versions are very similar; you sometimes have to scroll right and left on either to see content that appears horizontally on the desktop (though, of course, you won’t need to scroll as much if you just turn the phone sideways). And whether you’re in the employee or admin version, you’ll have to do some maneuvering to see all the data on content-heavy screens like reports and pay stubs.

Capable, Usable, and Affordable

Payroll involves a complex set of data and tasks. It requires as much simplicity in terms of user interface and navigation as developers can manage. Small businesspeople are already struggling with the concepts, and they don’t need to fight with their application, too. Every current service we’ve reviewed does a good job of simplifying this onerous process. Gusto stands out in the crowd, though. It rarely puzzles you about what’s needed on any given screen and what the next step should be. Given the service’s visual appeal, it’s a pleasure to use.

Gusto’s features and usability make it a good choice for small businesses, because of its payroll management features, exceptional user experience, and company support. It excels in every element of payroll, and takes a very friendly, understandable approach to a rather unfriendly process, once again earning it a PC Mag Editors’ Choice. Our other top pick is OnPay, whose strong blend of payroll and HR tools, combined with a beautiful, understandable user experience, make it a versatile solution for larger outfits (with over 100 employees) and verticals.

While you’re thinking about your bottom line, you should also check out our roundups of the best online accounting services and tax software.

Gusto Specs

Best Payroll Picks

Further Reading