It is well suited for mid- to large enterprises, whereas it might be overwhelming for small organizations with fewer headcounts to manage. Overall, it's a good tool for employee profile management.
Guideline is well suited for a comprehensive 401k service to most any business, whether small (10 or fewer employees) or far larger businesses. They can help employees understand how to invest their money and provide options for them. An employee can allow the people at Guideline to invest their money based upon a simple algorithm of conservative/moderate/less moderate risk or the employee can invest as they choose. Guideline is probably not the best suited as far as the type of financial advice one might get from more established investments and financial groups.
I feel that the customer support was abysmal - In my experience, we were consistently given conflicting advice and statuses as we closed our account with Guideline. Despite many, many follow-ups attempting to clarify our current status and remaining steps to close the account, Guideline's reps continued to provide, I believe, misleading and inaccurate steps. This cost us thousands and thousands of dollars given Guideline was not able to appropriately pull the funds before closing the account.
Guideline's integrations - I believe there is clearly a broken pipeline between Guideline and Rippling. In my experience, contributions were not funded as expected when we first opened the account, and when we closed our account, there was no communication between Guideline and Rippling. Guideline continued to expect contributions into perpetuity despite closure of the account
I feel that Guideline's product itself is just broken in critical places - most importantly, statuses of contributions were reflected incorrectly in the software (Guideline thought funds were transferred, but they were not and Guideline never attempted to pull the funds from our bank). This, combined with the terrible customer support, cost us thousands and thousands of dollars after we closed our account. There are many absolutely critical features that are broken -> to give just one of many examples, it was not possible to update the bank account information and no error message was thrown. I was told that our account ended up in an exceptional state given our last payroll contribution date and account closure, but these seem like very basic things a 401k provider has to get right if there are going to manage people's money.
Employees can log in and access their 401k accounts. They can make changes, check their balance or take out loans, with confidentiality. I give it an 8 because it takes 10 days to 2 weeks for those changes to get to me (the administrator) so I can make the necessary changes to their payroll profiles. I think a 5 day waiting period would be more reasonable.
Had a past participant from 20 years ago, receive a letter from the government saying they might have a retirement account. Empower helped this employee and I didn't have to play detective concerning this person. They back tracked to Merrill Lynch to find this former participant and help her. I was impressed.
The few questions that we've had have been answered quickly and helpfully. The implementation was a breeze and the onboarding contacts were really helpful. There was some stuff I had to learn about 401(k)s in making the decision to implement Guideline, but the Guideline team was helpful in pointing me in the right direction.
We went with Guideline as it was more affordable than alternatives. I believe this ended up being a terrible mistake. Invest in a stronger 401k partner. Human Interest was the other provider we were considering. I don't know if closing an account would have been as complicated with other providers, but I certainly know the support would have been better and more transparent with a provider like Human Interest
