Complaint Review: Gusto - San Francisco 525 20th St.

This is the 4th company I've used Gusto with as an employer. If things work, you get what you pay for. Basically, just someone to pay your employment taxes and file your quarterly reports.

If something goes wrong though... prepare for your life to be turned upside down.   And as it stands now, we've been triple billed consistently with zero refunds and no interest from Gusto in solving the problem.

There are so many "wrongs" that can happen, so here's a short list of what we experienced in the last 6 months.

1. Direct deposit not working correctly for employees.

2. Gusto staff arbitrarily switching employees to live checks instead of Direct Deposit and not notifying you. (Since Gusto doesn't print the live check, that means that you unknowingly don't pay your employee on time and it hurts them and their families)

3. Not actually filing your unemployment reports (we were fined 3 times because Gusto did not file these on time)

4. Customer support - the support. Submitting a support request to Gusto means that whomever receives it will not read any message histories and you have to start from square one each time.

5. Blame. The first approach of Gusto customer service is to blame you for whatever problem you're contacting them about. This sounds normal at first, until you realize that it's going to require 10 hours of your time to produce whatever is required to shift focus back on the real problem.

6. ACH challenges. For a time, Gusto was triple billing our account. From speaking with other customers we realized that this was a common problem and it causes a huge nightmare. The nightmare isn't just caused by the extra money paid, but in our case... our bank repeatedly flagged Gusto's transactions as fraudulent. The result of that was that our bank accounts were locked, and then in response Gusto locked our payroll accounts until we paid a "past-due" balance, even though they had already charged us that amount. That resulted in hours of Gusto customer care to unlock payroll and resolve the problem so we could issue checks again.

7. You will likely have to issue paper checks. Because of Gusto's method of locking you out, you will not be able to run payroll while solving any of these problems. For us, this meant that over half of our payroll had to be worked out by hand and we had to pay taxes manually and spend extra hours to combine data for unemployment reporting.

8. Gusto will not call you. at all. At least in our experience, Gusto's preferred method of dealing with a problem was not addressing it at all and continuing billing. To put that bluntly, you won't know you have a problem until you try to run payroll. If you are bi-weekly or semi-monthly you'll have scramble time. For us though, state law dictates that payroll happens each week. That means that we have to run Payroll on Monday and have funds in the account by Wednesday. If ANYTHING goes wrong, there is not enough time to respond and solve the problem by payday. You will be writing manual checks.

9. Gusto staff are unwilling to transfer you to a supervisor if a customer care representative can't solve your problem. Instead, they just go dark and stop responding.

10. On paper Gusto sounds like it will save you money. And that may be the case if the stars align and nothing ever goes wrong. However, if ANYTHING misfires, you will be dealing with it for months and burning your time. Gusto has no respect for the value of your time. My firm bills our hourly rates to clients at $350, and I can easily lose 3-4 hours per week dealing with Gusto. My firm is busy enough that this translates directly into lost revenue because we're so busy that you have to clear your schedule to deal with it.

Right now, we have spent 5 months dealing with the last problem that is not resolved yet. We will likely be asking our attorney general in our state to step in soon, and we have been contacted by a group that is trying to form a class action. Unfortunately we will likely be joining that as well since Gusto is uninterested in solving our issues in any reasonable way.

My advice to anyone considering using Gusto is to evaluate what your time is worth and establish whether or not you have the staff in place to deal with the problems. If you process payroll yourself, you likely don't have the extra bandwidth available to donate to Gusto's customer support team.