Great value. All the features you need.

Gusto - a breeze for small biz

My experience managing Gusto is from the POV of a company with seasonal employees, but I also worked at two other companies that used it. That's the thing: there's great carryover if someone already worked for a company that used Gusto, as administrators can access any stored documents easily (and the employees don't have to worry about uploading a new form every time). It makes tracking tax forms a lot easier, knowing that they're always going to be in the same place. Running payroll is mostly intuitive as well, though there's a bit of a learning curve involved to make sure all the automations are as needed.

Pros

Gusto makes it easy to interface with all your employees, making direct deposits and tax forms a breeze.

Cons

Honestly, I can't find any downsides that outweigh the benefits of Gusto for our small business. If anything, it challenges me (as a manager with not a lot of administrative experience, as we don't have a separate department to take care of it) to learn the ins & outs. This can be a learning curve when it comes to, say, automations and admin permissions, but a gentler one than I would expect.

Payroll done simple enough for ANY staff member.

Gusto is extremely helpful and efficient. My team enjoys the "social media" aspect of it, where new hires are introduced to the team before they even begin working. It goes a long way towards building a team. I would highly recommend Gusto to any small business trying to manage their staff. Onboarding is a breeze and gets the employees involved in their own financial matters. Even the least tech savvy person should be easily capable of following the necessary steps to be hired, paid, etc.

Pros

Employees are able to punch in and out using anything with an internet connection. Additionally, you can turn on Geolocation so that you can ensure the employee is actually on-site when they punch in & out. Best yet, they can actually leave notes in regards to what tasks were completed for the day. It's very helpful to have this built-in tracking feature for accountability with my very small staff.

Cons

Unfortunately, there is no effective scheduling tool (at least in my opinion), which forces me to go to another software provider for employee scheduling. Ideally, both scheduling and payroll could be done through the same web based software. This would also make it easier to compare scheduled vs. actually worked hours.

Gusto Free Trial

I ended it after the free trial

Pros

It was an all in one software for payroll

Cons

I didn’t really like the paying per contractor

Great for payroll

It's great for payroll. We don't pay for the leave management or other items because it is too expensive, but the payroll features are great.

Pros

Gusto is great for it's payroll and benefits platform. They do exactly as they say they are going to do and take care of all tax liabilities on time, with no concern of being wrong or late.

Cons

Their customer service is terrible. You typically get a representative that tells you the same thing that is in their knowledge base and then can't escalate you to talk to someone actually knowledgeable but can request a call back. The call backs don't happen and you receive an email, which typically doesn't answer your question because the initial representative didn't pass along the information correctly.