Gusto Reviews

platform online is modern and easy to use.

We’ve been using Gusto for years, and while there have been ups and downs, the biggest disappointment has been their FSA platform. It’s truly subpar compared to other services we’ve used. It seems like the default approach is to deny claims, even when we provide all the correct documentation and information.

The process is unnecessarily frustrating, with no clear explanations for denials, leaving us in a constant loop of resubmitting claims and waiting for approval that never seems to come. Gusto’s FSA platform feels more like an obstacle than a helpful service, and it has caused headaches for our team.

While the payroll and other HR features are decent, the FSA platform is a dealbreaker. If you’re considering Gusto and FSA management is important to you, I’d strongly recommend looking elsewhere.

Gusto is very easy to learn and use for payroll.

It would be good if they have more options to customize.
It is working very well about basic things though.

I like the quirky personality and fun images. Finance and Payroll is a very serious area of business. It is refreshing to have a program like Gusto add a little spice to things. They have a decorated, prancing pig as a logo. :)

I came very close to damaging my vocal cords at the end of our first year. The State of Wisconsin sent me a letter directly saying that we owed $16,000 in back payroll taxes plus over a thousand dollars in interest and penalites. I called Wisconsin myself and quickly determined what the problem was. It was a simple error Gusto made when filling out our annual gross pay and withholding report. The first 3 months were compliled by me. We started with Gusto in November. The 4th quarter number Gusto sent to the State was a total of all 3 of my quarters PLUS the total for the 4th quarter. We had approx. $4,000 in taxes due to the State each quarter. All money was paid, by myself for 3 quarters and Gusto for the 4th quarter. However, the man who signed the form at Gusto entered $20,000 for the 4th quarter and $32,000 (3 qtrs X $4,000 plus $20,000) for the annual total. We had paid $16,000. This created a shortage of $16,000 according to the automated computer at the Wisconsin Department of Revenue. Hence, the letter filled with interest and penalties.

The lady Wisconsin DOR was very helpful and much to my surprise, I was able to correct the annual filing myself online with her help on the phone. The $16,000 was no longer due. However, everyone in the entire State of Wisconsin system was powerless to eliminate the interest and penalties.

I had to make well over 10 phone calls and emails just to talk to someone at Gusto who could help me. I explained that the immediate problem was cleared up by me. However, Gusto was responsible, per how ALL payroll companies sell their services, for the interest and penalties since Gusto was entirely to blame.

It was SO FRUSTRATING that the first people answering the phone acted as though they had NO IDEA that Gusto even processed government payroll reports. Once, while ON HOLD, and intermittently talking to a live person for 45 minutes, I asked this entry level phone answerer which office they were in: east coast or west coast? They said that they COULDN'T ANSWER!!! We went round and round with excuse after excuse why he couldn't answer. Starting with "I don't know" and ending up with "I'm afraid that you may buy an airplane ticket to my city, hunt me down and violently attack me." I was livid. But that wasn't why I screamed at the top of my lungs.

Finally, after 10 contacts and many failed promises to have a manager contact me, a top woman manager in the appropriate department came to the phone after another half-hour plus wait. We reviewed the situation. Again, this was a VERY SIMPLE SITUATION. An honest mistake that anyone who has ever filled out a government form, or a middle school math test, could easily have done and in hindsight would be able to see their error and admit that they made a mistake.

The Gusto manager said several times, which I remember like it happened yesterday: "I will get back to you after reviewing this situation, and IF Gusto made an error, we will remedy the situation." IF IF? IF GUSTO MADE AN ERROR?!?!?!?!?! IF I lost my cool demeanor. I am mild mannered and like to laugh and joke. Be a nice guy. Hence, wondering what the weather was like and which sports teams the man on hold would like to talk about. Except that he thought that I could possibly be a violent threat even though, east coast or west coast I was a long airplane flight away!! This manager said "IF" one too many times. I SCREAMED THE OBVIOUS! "GUSTO WAS UNDER CONTRACT TO FILE THE PAPERWORK. GUSTO PERSONNEL SIGNED THE PAPERWORK. I HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH IT OTHER THAN I CLEANED UP THE MESS GUSTO CREATED. NOW GUSTO NEEDS TO PUT ON THEIR BIG GIRL PANTS AND TAKE RESPONSIBILITY FOR THEIR ERROR. THERE IS NO IF INVOLVED." {How can I make the word IF twice the size and bold so it stands out more? Standard text doesn't come close to how furious I was. First over 10 contacts I initiated. Then being told...'IF Gusto made a mistake" when the mistake was obvious.

The user interface is really nice looking and it is easy to get started and use - when it is working.

There are a LOT of glitches, and customer service cannot help you at all. Some of their backend processes make no sense, and they get really snarky when you ask questions.

Onboarding process is easy and easy interface for employees.

Customer service is absolutely horrible. There's no problem-solving solutions in place. There are many times that I call and hang up to call back once I hear Someone that I know will not be any help to me. I keep calling until I hit the lottery and actually get someone who is invested in helping me resolve issues. There's no care for the actual business owner. This company only cares about their monthly fee and could care less about your issues with their company. They take forever to resolve issues, like a whole week. SO, make sure you don't have any payroll issues during the pay week because your staff will not get paid through this platform.

In general, the payroll features are easy to set-up and use.

I don't like that their payroll journal entries can only map to main accounts and not sub-accounts. I don't like that they don't seem to understand that Group Term Life Insurance premiums paid by the employer are taxable benefits to the employee, but no cash is exchanged between employer and employee. They set up the journal entries to reflect a cash payment to the employee and I haven't found a way to disable that. Finally, I have had repeated support issues, most notably, all of my employees that were employed during 2022 were notified of a "Draft" W-2c for the 2022 tax year uploaded to their employee accounts on 12/4/2023. Those "Draft" W-2cs for the prior year were erroneous. After spending hours upon hours reviewing each employee's payroll totals for the 2022 tax year and ensuring there was no such error that needed correcting, I reached out to Gusto through the only feature possible when you need to provide attachments which is an online form. I submitted one for every, single employee. I received a single reply email saying "not to worry" they would address it. I never received a follow-up until I insisted that they call me back. On follow-up, I was told that it was a "company-wide internal error." Furthermore, they couldn't remove the erroneous "Draft" 2022 W-2cs from my employees' accounts and they couldn't provide any official documentation to provide to my employees that the error was theirs and theirs alone. I demanded some sort of compensation at the very least to which they offered a 25% discount for 2 months which amounts to roughly $130 which barely covers 2 hours of my time spent dealing with the mess that they created. Furthermore, when my January bill came, they had not provided the discount. I'm assured that it will appear on my "next" bill but I'm not holding my breath. They should have reached out to their clients pre-emptively about this problem. They should have been responsive to my 16 support tickets about this problem. They should have offered multiple months of free service to compensate for this problem. They offered nothing voluntarily. Nothing. This is absolutely unacceptable handling of a "company-wide error." Oh, and I ran into a different tax compliance issue with city-wide occupational tax with which they should be intimately familiar since their headquarters are located in an adjacent city with an identical occupational tax and yet their own employees didn't seem to understand the nuance of this tax to which their own employees are subject. What kind of payroll company doesn't understand the payroll taxes in their own jurisdiction?

I loved Gusto's simplified and easy to use GUI. It also had very nice minimalist art that was very cute and appealing. I enjoyed using it to track my paystubs and submit request to take paid time off.

I didn't have much I didn't like about Gusto, except when my company moved to a competitor and I could no longer use it.

Gusto is a one-stop solution for human resource and payroll management. It has a very easy-to-use user interface, with employee management, payroll tracking, employee hiring features as well. Also, customer support is quick and effective.

The product is a bit on the costlier side, which makes it difficult for small startups to adopt to such useful software.

Super easy to navigate and plenty of options to operate small business benefits and payroll

A little bit complicated to set up specific payroll features but customer support is very helpful

User interface for employees is ok. It looks nice.

For those searching if Gusto is a good choice...its not...I thought it was...had a few hiccups, nothing major...and then they overdrew my account, cool fixed it quickly, then I switched our benefits to them. They messed up the withdrawl dates, blamed me and then [sensitive content hidden]
clearly stated they made the change), and then took no responsibility for it. Worst than that, then they penalized me bc the change they made overdrew my bank account bc it pulled two months of benefit premiums and then wouldn't change my processing time back. After SEVEN different people "helping" and "responding" to my issue, I switched. While I like their feature set, its not worth the massive headache that comes when any little thing goes wrong- steer clear!!!