What Time Does Gusto Pay

Gusto, still relatively young in a crowded field of established payroll services, stands out. It provides a smart set of commonly-used payroll tools for small businesses and an exceptional user experience that should especially appeal to managers unfamiliar with payroll. Gusto has steadily improved over the years, adding new functionality recently in areas like hiring and onboarding, payroll run flexibility, and employee paycheck management. It continues to provide excellent support for every area it covers.

Gusto wins an Editors' Choice award for small business payroll services once again this year because of its usability, customizability, mobile access, comprehensive setup tools, and management of payroll runs. We recommend it first to new payroll managers and very small businesses (1-10 employees). For larger businesses, our Editors' Choice pick is Rippling because of its superior enterprise support.

How Much Does Gusto Cost?

Gusto now has four different tiers. The least expensive is Gusto Contractor, which offers unlimited contractor payments, plus 1099 creation and filing at a rate of $6 per person per month (with no base price). I reviewed the Core plan again this year ($39 per month, plus $6 per employee per month), which focuses primarily on payroll processing and the supporting records and tools.

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The Complete tier ($39 per month, plus $12 per employee per month) adds more HR features, including impressive hiring and onboarding tools, as well as time tracking, project management, and next-day deposit capabilities. The top-end Concierge level ($149 per month, plus $12 per employee per month) gets you access to certified HR pros and a dedicated support team (including a direct phone number).

Similar Products

Gusto Core is comparable with much of the competition in terms of price, though Patriot Software ($10 per month, plus $4 per month per employee or contractor) and Sure Payroll ($19.99 per month, plus $4 per employee per month) are cheaper. You have to submit your own payroll taxes and filings to get those prices, though the sites do all of the required calculations. QuickBooks Payroll costs between $45 and $125 per month, plus per-employee fees. QuickBooks Payroll's top-level tier is cheaper than Gusto's, though its equivalent to Gusto's Core plan is pricier.

Simplified Setup With Gusto

Setting up a payroll application is complicated and 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 it needs and supporting you with detailed help files and demos. It uses a multistep wizard to do so, much as OnPay and other competitors do. But it's more comprehensive than the competition; most sites begin the process using the setup tool, but then you're on your own to explore the site's settings. Unlimited chat, email, and phone support are available should you need help.

Gusto walks new users through a thorough set of setup procedures.

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. If you've set up an integration with a performance application (like the new 15Five relationship), you see that data when you click the Performance tab. Click the Time Off tab, and the screen displays related requests and policies, as well as a tracking history. The Documents page 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 (SUI) tax. Providing state tax details can be an especially complicated process, so Gusto includes helpful explanations and links in this section.

You can choose from several types of payroll runs in Gusto.

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's payroll is more flexible than it was the last time I reviewed it. You can now pay employees on different schedules, and pay runs are unlimited. OnPay has offered this flexibility for years.

As you continue through the setup wizard, Gusto also asks you to sign required documents and set up workers' compensation. 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 during the setup and in different ways. The final step in the setup wizard involves selecting the right Gusto plan for your business. Up until this point, you don't pay anything; Gusto saves any data you've entered as you go.

Providing Historical Data

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.

You also have to enter unpaid tax liabilities. There are additional setup steps for benefits administration, other deductions, and garnishments, as well as recurring reimbursements (travel expenses, phone charges, and others are supported). Again, almost every competing application includes these elements, too. 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 excel at this task. 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 (available in 40 states at this writing). Individuals can request up to 40% of their estimated net wages for the next pay period (maximum $500) and get the cash as soon as the next day (or instantly if you have a Gusto debit card—more on that later). The funds are then deducted from the next paycheck.

Gusto's BA portal also offers great self-service functionality and 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. Further, Gusto now supports Health Reimbursement Agreements (HRAs). These are federal programs that give companies a tax break when they contribute money to employees to help them pay their own health insurance premiums. HRAs can only be established if your company doesn't already offer health insurance benefits.

Payroll Processing With Gusto

Processing the actual 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.

Gusto hours and additional earnings breakdown

Gusto presents a clean, understandable screen for entering and verifying payroll hours.

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. There are also recommendations for tasks your business should complete, like setting up a Workers' Compensation policy. Upcoming employee celebrations are listed, too. SurePayroll is better at this overview; its 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 corrected payroll run. You can now also report a payroll you processed outside of Gusto. 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. Click on the link in the Actions column to edit deductions or skip payroll for that employee. If you're unsure of anything, save your data and come back to it later. Few sites offer a similar ability to save and return 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. This is important information to include here. It can save you a trip back to another section of the site to verify the employee's time off status.

Payroll managers can enter and verify time off hours on the second screen of the payroll run process in Gusto.

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 as well as the employee pay date. The tables below this information display links to lists of what gets taxed and debited, employee earnings and take-home pay, and your company contributions. Below that is a list of employees with key numbers from the current payroll. You can open a huge, all-encompassing table of that payroll run's data, which you can download as a CSV or PDF file. This is the best payroll preview page I've seen among the sites I've reviewed.

Before you approve a payroll in Gusto, you get a thorough preview of the run.

Click Submit payroll, and the confirmation page appears, displaying the debit amount and date as well as employee pay date and total payroll. You can also revisit some of the data presented on the previous page or cancel the payroll.

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. Gusto's is the simplest and best overall.

You pay contractors separately, using a similar wizard-like tool. The service now allows you to pay contractors within two days instead of the previous four. Gusto Core supports time tracking for both contractors and employees through integrations with services like QuickBooks Time (formerly TSheets) and When I Work. Built-in time tracking is not available at the Core level.

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, you need only approve it.

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.

Most payroll services calculate taxes the due and submit them, though Patriot Software and SurePayroll offers low-cost subscription levels that don't include automatic submission of filings and payment (they do the calculations). This is a tremendous service, since calculating and tracking payroll taxes can easily result in errors. Gusto prepares both W-2s and 1099s at no extra charge, whereas Patriot Software and SurePayroll charge for them.

The Gusto User Experience

Gusto displays a cute little pig named Penny while many screens are loading (she's wearing a mask this year). The pig is running fast, but the pages don't load as fast as she runs in many cases; I waited over a minute for one payroll report in testing. She does distract you from the delay, however.

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, and color are excellent. The site's layout and navigation tools make a lot of sense, too.

Help is abundant and prominently displayed throughout the experience. When you open the payroll-processing section, for example, there's a link in the upper right corner that says, "I need help with this." When you click on it, you can watch a video or click on links to other help content. You can also search the Help Center and contact Gusto by phone, email, or chat.

Custom Reports

Once you finish your payroll, you should look over it and analyze the data. That's where reports come in. You can view them directly or download them as a CSV or PDF (in some cases, you can only download them). The site includes an excellent set of report templates, for both payroll (such as the Payroll Protection Program Loan, Agency Payments, and Employee Summary) and HR (such as Benefits Report and Time Off Requests) areas. There's also a report for the custom fields you've created.

Gusto does a great job of letting you easily customize many of its reports with a variety of filters. This is especially evident in the Employee Report Builder. You can prepare this report by first selecting the columns you want to appear from a few dozen options, like employment type and payment method. Then, you can filter by type of employee; for example, you can sort by employment status or pick specific employees. There's a payroll report that looks equally as powerful and customizable, but it's still in beta. Reports aren't Gusto's most impressive feature—that would be payroll processing itself—but there are more than enough to keep a payroll manager happy.

Gusto on Mobile Devices

It's hard to imagine actually running a payroll on a phone as small as an iPhone SE, but it can be done. This is not particularly convenient—you have to do a lot of scrolling—but Gusto enables you to do this better than most other sites. The site is easily accessible through a mobile web browser; there's no separate app. It looks and works very much like the full desktop version. There was nothing I couldn't find, though I ran into a little navigation trouble when I downloaded a report to a CSV file.

The mobile version of Gusto replicates the desktop browser experience quite well. You can run a payroll from your smartphone by accessing Gusto in your mobile web browser.

The admin mobile site 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 depending on whether you use 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.

The company has renamed its mobile app for employees since the last time I reviewed it and added banking features. Now called Gusto Wallet, the app for Android and iOS devices allows W-2 employees to access information such as their most recent paystubs; a people directory; personal details and time off; benefits and pay; and HR documents. The app is excellent, as are many of the competition's, like OnPay's.

What's new is its banking capabilities. You can deposit your paycheck or funds from another account and automatically split your paycheck into an optional Gusto spending and savings accounts—even external ones—using the Gusto debit card to withdraw cash and make purchases. You can also create up to five savings goals and have a specified amount of money deposited to them automatically. Cash accounts at this writing earn 0.09% APY, roughly three times the national average. The issuing financial institution is an NBKC bank, Member FDIC. Gusto Wallet is also accessible through a desktop web browser.

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. Every current service we've reviewed does a good job of simplifying this onerous process, but Gusto stands out for its top-notch features, intuitive design, and excellent support options. Companies that need even more functionality like built-in time and project tracking and user permission levels need to upgrade to the more-expensive Complete version, however. For its very friendly, understandable approach to a rather unfriendly process, Gusto once again earns our Editors' Choice award.

Rippling also wins an Editors' Choice award this year. Like Gusto, it's easy to use and supports all of the most common tools needed for payroll—and then some. Rippling's customizability, speed, and third-party app integration make it a particularly smart choice for larger businesses with more than 10 employees.

Gusto

Cons

The Bottom Line

Gusto will appeal to both new and experienced payroll administrators because of its usability and top-notch payroll setup, processing, and reporting tools. Additional HR capabilities and excellent support make Gusto the best in its class.

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