Guideline headquartered in San Mateo offers a cloud-based 401k management software for businesses priced on a per employee basis.
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OnPay
Score 9.9 out of 10
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OnPay's payroll and HR is designed for people who want to spend more time running their business, and less on back-office tasks. The application aims to enable users to: • Run payroll • Automate taxes • Let employees do more themselves • Simplify HR processes • Offer benefits in any state OnPay is $49 plus $6 per person each month. The monthly fee includes integrations with QuickBooks, Xero, and time-tracking software, as well as all quarterly and year-end…
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Pricing
Guideline
OnPay
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Guideline
OnPay
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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First month free, then $49 + $6 per employee each month.
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'd say if you had someone who wasn't educated on how Payroll should be setup and function OnPay is less ideal. But even then you've got things so well setup and cost efficient, they could afford to put some focus on training. In my mind I imagine OnPay is the best solution for small to mid, even early large, company Payroll processing. We're a small company so I'm unaware of the options provided to streamline importing of large group payrolls, but that might be an area where the interface could provide challenges.
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.
I would like to enter some payroll information in advance of the current payroll runs
Adding and changing administrators was a bit cumbersome and took several days
It works fine for a small number of people being paid if they can be seen on one screen but it might be cumbersome with more than about 10 people. Probably needs a better or different procedure with more people.
We have used OnPay for a few years now and we do continue to renew our annual use of OnPay. We are only a small organization and although OnPay provides a lot of additional services that larger organizations might ind useful, OnPay still meets our limited requirements of running bi-weekly payroll and submitting our quarterly state and federal tax documents, and at a price that we still find affordable.
OnPay is very easy to use. The computer interface is setup very well. You can quickly add people, enter your Payroll, print reports, etc. If your Payroll doesn't change from pay period to pay period (example, salaried employees) it takes mere seconds to enter in your Payroll.
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.
I've only had to call a couple of times, and each time the customer service rep is extremely thorough and helpful. I've never had the experience, like I do with some other companies, of feeling stressed or irritated with the reps. They are competent, educated, and easily walk me through the system
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
OnPay is tremendously less expensive and technically superior to Quickbooks in my opinion. OnPay is less expensive and offered the ease of managing a restaurant payroll that was better in my opinion than When I Work. My experience when evaluating all of the payroll products that I felt the company could afford was that OnPay had a superior staff of professionals who knew their product and could explain how to use it most clearly.
