Guideline headquartered in San Mateo offers a cloud-based 401k management software for businesses priced on a per employee basis.
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SurePayroll
Score 3.8 out of 10
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SurePayroll offers an online payroll service that lets small business owners run payroll anywhere, anytime. The vendor automatically pays and files federal, state and local payroll taxes.
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Pricing
Guideline
SurePayroll
Editions & Modules
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Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Guideline
SurePayroll
Free Trial
No
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
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More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Guideline
SurePayroll
Considered Both Products
Guideline
Verified User
Anonymous
Chose Guideline
Guideline is useful to keep track of employee retirement portfolios and keep the information visible instantly for the employees. It handles contributions towards the retirement account.
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 …
We selected Guideline due to their relationship with Gusto, our payroll service. However, we did review alternative options for our 401k program and found them very competitive as to price and quality. We were thinking about going with one of the bigger companies like Schwab, …
Not listed, but I have used ADP Retirement services and we switched vendors to Empower. Both vendors have much more robust employee tools to calculate dollars needed at retirement and how percentage changes in the 401(k) allow for changes later in life at retirement. In …
The only other employer retirement planning system I've use is Voya. I felt much more in the dark about how my financial planning was working, and honestly didn't even know how much money I had deposited until I left for my new job. I also had no clue on what my risk level was …
We didn't find any viable competitive option for Gusto that had the trifecta of low fees, Gusto integration and that handled all the plan management. There were plenty of other companies like Sharebuilder, Fidelity or Vanguard (to name a few) that do have low cost 401(k) …
I was not part of the committee that selected SurePayroll so I am unsure about why SurePayroll was selected. I do know our Board and Executive Director looked for a platform that was cost-efficient and helped us achieve the goals of our organization without taking up too much …
SurePayroll offers a comparable service at a better rate. They are better designed for small companies who need to save money any way they can. Their fees are more appropriate than ADP but the service offerings are just as good.
QuickBooks was not user-friendly, tech support was nonexistent, and I still had to file federal and state filings. SurePayroll takes care of all that for me.
SurePayroll is lower cost than Paychex, but I would recommend using Paychex despite their higher cost because they are more closely in communication with the tax divisions that are administering payroll taxes, and are less likely to make an error in my experience so far.
I've used ADP previously. I've used Paychex, which SurePayroll is now part of. None of the solutions are perfect, so I'll stay with SurePayroll until something better comes along.
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.
We use SurePayroll to make monthly payrolls in our company, as well as to close the month and year with all the income and expenses and most importantly to make tax payments. The application is perfect for making payrolls when the personnel adapted for it is not in the head office, SurePayroll has an application for mobiles that allows to make these operations remotely. The application is perfect when you want to make immediate payments, at the time of loading the payroll to the system, it proceeds to automatically perform transactions for each employee entered without any error.
Super easy interface - honestly running payroll couldn't be easier on their site.
Incredible customer service - VERY knowledgeable, professional and friendly. They will walk you through anything you need to do on the site and understand payroll, tax and benefit issues.
Tax filing and payments and year-end paperwork for 1099 contractors and W-2s. They make it so easy.
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.
My chief complaint is the software sometimes requires me to have a code sent to my phone before I can continue with some process. That in itself is fine. The problem is the check box that lets SurePayroll remember the computer doesn't actually do that. I select that check box every time, but the software doesn't remember me or my computer.
Fees have creeped higher every year over the last two or three years. I feel like I'm nitpicking here, though. What I spend for the service is reasonably priced for the amount of headaches it prevents.
I have a case where an employee is sometimes salaried and sometimes contract. There's not a way to handle that without terminating him when he needs to switch.
It's a poor user interface. It feels like the interface is twenty years old. If you make a mistake with payroll in their terrible UI, and try to correct it 15 seconds later, they want to charge you $39 to correct your mistake. Overall, a very poor experience in terms of user interface.
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.
SurePayroll was great when we had questions or needed support, ie. if we messed up with a payroll, needed to submit tax documents or get documents. The ease of communication between us and the organization was great and they made it easy for users to call in with support requests.
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
I was not part of the committee that selected SurePayroll so I am unsure about why SurePayroll was selected. I do know our Board and Executive Director looked for a platform that was cost-efficient and helped us achieve the goals of our organization without taking up too much time, so that is why we decided on this platform.
SurePayroll has made my life so much easier. Prior to using a payroll service and trying to do it myself, I was charged fees by the government for failure to file correctly or on time. Having it done professionally and correctly eases stress.
