Gusto Review: What’s up with this accounting service?
Gusto is one of the best extensive accounting services you could find online. It’s a complex platform, but, in general, it allows you to automate and simplify payroll management, human resources, employee benefits, reports, and much more. Moreover, this service helps you make financial statements much faster and with less headache.
However, once again, it’s a rather complex platform. Not that it’s difficult to get a grip of it – there’s just a lot to cover. It can only be an advantage because many of these functions are very helpful and effective. Moreover, you get a large package of features in one affordable monthly subscription.
Let’s see exactly what you get for your money in this thorough Gusto review.
What is Gusto?
Gusto is a versatile accounting platform with many features to offer. Essentially, you can automate much of your business’ inner workings, including how you pay your workers, how you hire them, what sort of bonuses they receive once they’re on board. They even help you with taxes.
All of these niceties are generally represented in three major, big sections:
- Universal accounting software with payroll, HR & management features
- Additional software, including different apps that help you better manage a business, in addition to tools hosted on this platform
- Blog + other helpful trivia.
It’s a full-on provider of software & advice for growing and fully-fledged businesses. Growing companies can benefit a lot from various helpful tools this provider has to offer. Established businessescan automate and improve many accounting and HR processes.
There are actually plenty of similar providers out there, like Rippling or UKG. It’s now a matter of what provider you pick to promote management efficiency – obviously, you need the best of the best.
Gusto HR systems
Gusto brags a lot about its HR systems. That’s what they call the versatile software they utilize for payroll management, hiring & other sorts of interaction with employees. These systems are all about better contact with your employees.
Employers can decide to wire their business to a Gusto HR System. It’s a designer kit that allows them to manage their employee’s payroll, track their work time, control hiring, and do much more. Moreover, payroll, benefits, and other information are relayed to employees so that they can manage their resources just as well.
Employees, on their side, get to view all the information the employer deemed important through the Gusto Wallet app. It’s free and they get to see how much the employer pays, see what benefits they can count upon, as well as manage their money and time better.
So, it’s not just about improving the life of an employer. Its workers also get to enjoy the best possible management of their resources. If the business buys a Gusto subscription, its employees get to download the app for free, and that opens a lot of opportunities.
Different features
There are too many features in this system, and they vary based on the subscription plan the employer selected. You can view the full list in this plan comparison, but let’s just cover the basics.
This app is a mix between an e-wallet and a social media platform. You get to manage your tasks in many comfortable ways, but there are also many options for interaction between employees, employer and their employees, as well as experts paid to help you figure out what to do with your finances.
Pay management
Pay management is the central piece of this entire system, so to speak. There are many more features, but payroll is where they decided to put emphasis.
Employers get to structure salaries of their workers and contractors, pay them with one click (both to people who use the app and those who don’t), and manage all the associated paperwork with ease. All you need to do is connect your bank card to the service and start clicking the buttons.
The payroll is automated, although you may need to take into account that depositing money takes some time (a few days at most).
For employees, it’s even more exciting. Every time they get the pay, they receive a notification. The money is then stored on the app (if you use it) until you withdraw it elsewhere. Moreover, before they do that,they can manage these funds for future use. They can budget and allocate the money by putting it into different ‘funds’.
These funds are basically goals or purposes. Employees can simply withdraw the lotto their bank account and forget about budgeting. But if they want, they can use these features to save for a special day, vacation, or any other idea they may have. They can even automate the process so that it saves up a specific amount each time they receive a paycheck.
Benefits & work management
As an employee, apart from managing the paychecks, there are also many helpful features that allow one to view and manage the benefits (vacations, sick leaves, health insurance & more), paperwork (taxes, reports & more), and work performance (reviews, time & more).
As an employer, there are many more features that basically allow you to properly fill out all the bonuses and details for your workers. More than that, employers also get to fill their paperwork with much more efficiency thanks to this provider. You obviously also get to monitor your workers whenever you want.
Interaction
As an employer, you get to leave performance reviews for your workers, manage your relations with them, and hire people with more in-depth efficiency. You don’t really get to talk to them all that much, but there are other ways of contacting them if you wish – there’s really no room for messaging service, on top of everything else.
Both as an employee and employer, you can receive help from experts regarding nearly everything there is to do on Gusto. Tax filings, various forms, accounting, finances, HR, budgeting – all can be discussed with a professional who knows how the system works and how accounting works.
Apps & additional software
Besides this all-in-one platform, there are several more extensions, apps, and tools that allow employers to better manage their businesses. There is an extensive library of software, which can be used in conjunction with the Gusto system to better manage accounting, taxes, hiring, business opportunities, collaboration & much more.
So, in addition to doing much of your employertasks from one single platform, you get to spice it up with even more software to improve the overall quality of your business in accounting, finances, and many more activities.
The apps are all hosted on Gusto, which means you can integrate them with your usual experience on this platform rather easily. Many of them are free, some need to be bought. A good chunk of these extensions can be bought for cheaper simply because you access them on Gusto.Without Gusto, you’d have to pay the full price and use these separately.
In the end, there are also quite a few calculators and tools that help you do complex, specific calculations faster. Financial statements, taxes, payroll calculations, and reports, therefore, can be done much easier than usual. You could always find these online, but here, they are all under the same roof.
Blog & other trivia
In addition to having lots of practical tools, Gusto also provides a number of educational materials designed to improve your understanding of accounting, business management, HR, and countless other practices. If you’re still new to all of this, Gusto is a good place to start learning.
The blog is divided into several sections, including starting a business, hiring and growth, finances and taxes, team management,& Covid-19 resource hub.
Each section is updated on a regular basis with new, fresh material regarding a wide variety of topics associated with these larger categories. They still use a good number of professional terms, and they expect you to know at least something about accounting before coming here.
The articles are generally written by professionals, so you can count on them to provide you with answers or some enlightening truth you didn’t know about.
Summary
For a relatively cheap accounting service, Gusto provides a lot of features that make your routine as an employer and as an employee much easier. The app does have some performance issues – the connection can slow down to intolerable levels. Still, barring these issues, this platform is great for accounting and business management.
In the end, Gusto might just be the best option for the accounting software if you want to automate your business in this way.