Gusto — Local services in Denver

I wish I could give a -5 star. They took the funds from our account at the typical scheduled time and our bank records prove it. Then the deposits were not made to the employees and Gusto's reasoning is insufficient funds. Keep in mind that they took the funds at the typical time and we have documents showing this to be true. It is currently 12:49pm central time and we have been dealing with this since 7am today. There is still no resolve and their customer support is literally a call center person who is trying to transfer us to someone in their Denver office (no one answers in Denver); this has been going on for hours at this point. At this point the best case scenario is for me to come out of pocket again for payroll and write hard checks to my employees and hope and pray they will return the money they already took from my account.

I am writing this so that businesses will know my experiences before signing up with Gusto. I am fortunate to be able to cover payroll twice this week, however many small and start up companies may not have the funds or cash flow to be able to handle that.

Furthermore, I am furious because one of the employee's spouses called Gusto and someone there told them it was due to insufficient funds. Now I have to put that fire out and show my employees that Gusto is lying and there are sufficient funds. I can not believe they told a spouse that. It will not be a hard fire to put out because we have never missed a payroll but I've worked at small companies where this would have created a scare and possibly some employees would not come back to work the next week over it.

One last issue that is worth noting... many of the employees could potentially have automatic payments set up for bills etc. Due to Gusto's mistake (which we have gotten them to admit that now) some employees will have to take off early to deposit hard checks and will thus lose some hours this week. We will compensate the employees for this because it was not the employee's fault. However, this is all now my burden both time wise and financially, and I bet Gusto will not pay for their mistake.

An absolutely horrible scenario and Gusto could genuinely care less. I'll update this if they actually pay my employees today or return the money. HOWEVER, regardless of what they say below in the replies if I haven't updated this then it means they did nothing to rectify...

Don't Use GUSTO if you actually want a company that cares about their users. That's my personal recommendation.

Gusto "fraudelently" claims in their pricing that they have Best-In-Class support on all plans. In fact, unless you pay for the most expensive plan to get Dedicated support - the support is practically NON-EXISTENT.

If they didn't lie about having best-in-class service on all plans, I would not be writing this review. (Just to be clear this is not a reflection of the young lady who handled my support call, she was as helpful as possible...but Gusto ties their hands and gives them no ability to actually help.)

Companies should be honest about what you get...and their dedicated support happens to be AWESOME. If they simply said support and didnt lie about the actual support - I would be ok paying for service - but not when Im lied to about what to expect.

You need to hunt to even find a way to call, and than you can schedule a call back - which takes time. The person calling you has seemingly NO access to any information on your account - they need to put you on hold to look up or ask someone else for any piece of information, even simple things. like was an account charged. I would not be surprised if their "best-in-class" service was in fact an outsourced call center.

If you want to speak to a supervisor or get any real account help, you can be put in a queue and wait for a call back in an hour. I only found this out after asking to speak to someone who has access to my account, and being told sure, and than being on hold for 10 minutes and being told there is NOTHING you can do but wait for a call back.

I guess January is a busy time, especially with new PPP loans coming out - but its not like Gusto is starving - and they definitely have no right to FALSELY claim their support is best in class, when those claims are only referring to dedicated support which you DON'T get on the plans that claim...

Customer service call was so bad I don't even want to give it a one star I want to give it zero stars but that's not an option. The gentleman that took my call spoke over me way too many times to a point where I actually had to tell him to stop talking so that he could hear me. Verifying my account was never done. Your business practices need to be improved for people who do not have camera phones. My social security number and date of birth should have been more than enough information to verify my account without the absolute need for my driver's license or my facial recognition. Like I said to him I asked him how do you guys verify accounts with people who do not have cell phones or camera phones. He stated that everybody has one these days. Also not true. I highly suggest that you guys as a business train your employees better for customer service skills cuz this guy's customer service was not nearly the level it needed to be number one number two if it really is an absolute that you cannot verify an account based on a social security number and a date of birth alone and that it is mandatory to have a driver's license in facial recognition which you guys send through a third party website that a lot of phones don't trust. You guys need to find other ways and better ways to work with your customers especially during this busy tax season and especially with people's w-2s. It is illegal to not give people their w-2s and in my particular case it is complicated however it should not have been...