I love it when I don't have to think about things, and Gusto combined with Stripe (Atlas and card processing) have made it possible for me to not ever think about a whole lot of things.
Now if only there was a company as good as Stripe/Gusto that did accounting+taxes, I'd really be set! I mean, "I give you access to my accounts, (almost) never think about you, and I have a proper set of books and my taxes are fully done every year."
Pilot.com founder here. This is exactly the startup that we're working on! We have 500+ customers including 100+ YC companies and fully take care of bookkeeping + taxes. Feel free to drop me a note at jeff@pilot.com if I can help.
Fascinating. However, being an accountant, I have to wonder how it's possible to scale. With (accrual) accounting being so dependent on management's estimates, how does it work? Do you offer audit protection? Do you work with ext. auditors? Do you provide GAAP / tax guidance?
Startups and other SMBs have been using third party bookkeeping providers long before Pilot.com. We provide essentially the same interface/service as those companies, but we are leveraging technology to a much greater degree, which we think allows us to provide higher quality books and better service (ask our customers for their verdict there). We can connect companies with ways of meeting their audit and GAAP/tax guidance needs (providers who we work with regularly).
I'm actually a customer of Bench.co, but I've been somewhat frustrated and thinking about leaving. First, they are very slow-- the books for a given month are usually finalized at least a month later (so your May books won't be fully ready until July, sometimes even later). By the time they are ready, the information is "old news" and not useful for decision making. I end up running queries against my Stripe data to get more up-to-date financial info.
Also, they keep asking me to manually classify the same transactions every month, things that have always shown up in my books every month. I would think they would have learned by now, and that they haven't is a red flag that makes me wonder what else is broken.
Finally, they don't actually do taxes. My ideal bookkeeping system would automatically handle that so I don't have to think about it, in the same way that my Gusto payroll runs automatically without me having to even remember that it's happening.
Sorry to hear about your experience with us, Meekro. We try to provide as hands-free an experience as possible, but know we have work to do.
We're sometimes stuck relying on bank statements due to the poor quality of data coming from bank feeds. This means we need to wait until month end to finalize books (and sometimes later if a credit card statement has a late statement date), leading to the timing challenge you described. We do this to ensure your books are completely accurate and ready for tax-time, with no fixes needed.
To address the above problem, we recently launched a new feature we're calling Pulse, to help manage day-to-day cash flow and spending. We're releasing improvements to it every week. https://bench.co/blog/operations/cash-flow-pulse/
The manual classification issue sounds like a failure on our part. We should not be repeatedly requesting input on the same transactions. If you shoot me an email (joshua@bench.co), I'd be happy to help. From the Product side, we're experimenting with using clustering models to better tackle the problem and remove some burden from our bookkeepers.
Lastly, on the tax front, we've got you covered! Our ambition is to do exactly what you're looking for - handle bookkeeping and taxes together on the back end, so you don't have to think about it. We'll have a formal announcement coming very soon. Please reach out to your bookkeeper if interested.
I echo most of your frustrations with Bench. I've had more luck with Wave and their tooling is more interesting IMO. But their non-bookkeeping offer is piss poor.
My first attempt to find one blew up in my face. =(
I lived in LA at the time, so I looked for highly-rated local accountants on Yelp. The search led me to this one[1], who proceeded to make a series of nasty mistakes that led to a taxation authority seizing money from my bank account (among other problems). The whole mess took months of time and many thousands of dollars to clean up.
Later on, I settled on bench.co doing the bookkeeping, and found a CPA firm to prepare the taxes every year. It basically works, but it still feels archaic and clunky. Several people here suggested pilot, so I might look at that next.
If you have an accountant you'd like to recommend, I'd definitely be grateful!
The stories I've heard from CPAs and other friends is that it it's amazing for small companies < ~$300K annual revenue and then falls apart pretty quickly once you need to do something other than just basic reconciliation and pay taxes
I run a game server hosting business that does ~$600k in ARR, and I love focusing on the software side of it. I have a simple payroll with 2 recipients, and I love how Gusto is something I never have to think about. I enabled automatic payroll and muted their automatic emails, so the whole thing just runs every 2 weeks without me having to remember that it's happening.
I wish someone would do my regular tax filings in the same way that Gusto does the payroll tax filings: quietly and correctly, without making a huge show of it. Bench.co falls far short of that, for reasons I explained in an adjacent post here. They still make me go and manually classify the same transactions every month for some weird reason, and I have to double-check everything since I've seen them make plenty of simple mistakes. And they don't handle the tax filings themselves, either, which means more brain cycles on my part.
I used to like Gusto a lot. It worked fairly well when we were a few people, but as we grew, things started breaking, especially as our setup started becoming more and more complicated. For instance, we have offices in 5 states and two countries. Gusto doesn't support outside of US folks, so we had to maintain two systems.
One of the most frustrating things was the 2 day payroll. They turned it on for us, and the capped it at something like $60k even when we have millions of dollars in the bank account they have direct access to. Every two weeks, when the payroll supposed to be run, we had to contact support to request and exception which required a screenshot of our bank account balance. EVERY TWO WEEKS.
There is a lot of small things like this that forced us to talk to their support almost on daily basis. In some cases we waited for an answer for months.
As such, we recently switched to Rippling and are very happy with the decision. I'm glad that Gusto is working for so many people. I really enjoyed it while it did work for us.
They completely fucked me over. Not only did they not pay out commuter benefits (send the confirmation emails, didn't actually put the money in my account), but they ignored 4 (!!!) support requests in a row, sent once per day for a week. It wasn't until I got on the phone and was rude to someone that they deigned to help... and then missed their self-imposed communication deadlines.
Complete incompetent shitshow.
So yeah -- in case you were pondering using Gusto, just know that
* not paying out $250 in commuter benefits owed;
* not noticing the extra cash in their bank account;
* ignoring 3 polite emails to the support addresses, and one less polite request;
* ignoring the first phone call;
* requiring you to be rude;
* blowing their self-set update deadline;
is all part of the wonderful Gusto experience!
If you use them, I'd strongly suggest checking that all your commuter benefit reimbursements actually landed in your bank account.
With commuter benefits the employer has to manage everything themselves. If the benefit is a contribution it'll show up on your paystub, but your company needs to either reimburse you the amount (after you have already paid the commute cost personally) or provide you with a transit/benefits card. If it's a pre-tax deduction, it stays in the employer's bank account, again to reimburse you or provide a benefits card.[0]
It doesn't really make sense for this to work any other way. Commuter benefits are pre-tax, so if they just paid you the money outright it would be a pretty explicit violation of tax law. There needs to be a paper trail showing that the benefit money was spent on the actual benefit itself. I imagine their team might be confused by your questions.
Gusto manages (well, let's be honest, bedshits) benefits for my employer.
Gusto has gotten the money from my employer (and fyi, I'm a founder, so I'm very certain because I see the payroll pulls). We use a Gusto benefits card; I was getting refunds because the benefits card didn't work for my parking provider.
Well to be fair to them, I think their benefits card provider is a white labeled product from the neolithic era.[0]
Normally I'd say no excuses, but it seems like this was a regulatory necessity if they wanted to provide benefits cards at all. I'm a founder as well, so I can understand the need to provide a significant feature in the short term, even if it sucks a bit.
Being a founder (especially in compliance) I think you could be a bit more forgiving on your stance. A bad experience with a third party benefits card sucks, but saying they "completely fucked you over" feels fairly extreme - especially if your payroll has otherwise been running smooth.
So, the thing is, it's not a compliance problem. I also understand mistakes happen. Let's recap:
gusto
0 - stole a couple hundred dollars, and didn't notice at all (and for clarity, this was post reimbursement approval via their whitelabeled partner);
1 - ignored 4 support emails, one per day, for a week;
2 - blew off my first phone call, at the beginning of week 2 attempting to get this fixed;
3 - lied on my second, impolite phone call, about when they would follow up with me
4 - took another couple days with no status updates to acknowledge what happened and tell me what they would do.
The above is why I'm doing close to pulling rank and firing Gusto. None of the above is how a competent company treats a customer.
Bluntly, if a CSM at my company did that, either the CSM or his or her manager would be terminated. We can screw up, but we do not blow off customers, commit to following up and then fail to do so, or fail to take ownership over mistakes and at bare minimum communicate with customers.
(co-founder here) Sorry to hear about the issues you've had with our 2-day program. We've been working on making it better and the caps are now much more rarely used and we'll be getting rid of them completely shortly. Hope we can win you back one day :)
It does. It doesn't separate them and just allows you to have different types of workers in the same system. So for us we can have the same PTO, hardware and other things equal across the board, even if the employees are not equal in the eyes of the government.
I remember switching to Gusto early on in the life of my startup, and how surprised I was to realize that I was excited about payroll software. The UI and UX were 100x better than the stuck-in-the-90s software we were using previously. It made me really optimistic that starting a startup would only become easier as services like Gusto popped up to meet their needs.
My only gripe is that I liked the old name (ZenPayroll) better :P
I truly don't understand why a payroll company would need to raise 200 million dollars and what they could possibly do with the bulk of it aside from buying 24k gold toilets. You're not going to hire 200 million worth of people, or buy that many ads, you could build your own server farm for a fraction of that and cloud services would take quite a long time to burn through that. So why?
Why would you sell that much of your company to investors?
Why would you invest that much money in a payroll company?
I can sometimes understand it, say a company was working on some sort of energy generation and needed tens of millions of dollars of equipment/infrastructure to even start truly testing their idea, or you were going to sell some physical good that was going to sell for hundreds or thousands of dollars per unit and you've already been selling other versions but need a large amount of cash for the MOQ to manufacture your new hardware in the best setting and banks are hesitant to pony up, but for a payroll company?!
One way to think about it is that each employees costs $100k or $200k a year.
So for $100M, you can comfortably afford a few hundreds people for a few years with all the office space, benefits and hardware required. A regular small-medium business really, nothing special.
>One way to think about it is that each employees costs $100k or $200k a year.
Those are some expensive employees, me and my friends don't cost anywhere remotely near that. I make 34k a year after 13 years on the job. A company doesn't have to hire in one of the highest COL cities in the country.
If I was making 34k a year after 13 years on ANY job in the USA, I'd get off Hacker News ASAP and make changes in my life so that it doesn't reach 14 years.
As an answer to your original question, Gusto's CTO responded in the question above yours. His answer below:
Co-founder and CTO of Gusto here.
This is a REALLY good question and something that’s hard to appreciate until you actually to build a payroll system. I think a common misnomer is that if you’re not doing ML/AI/AR/blockchain/[insert latest technology here], you’re not doing R&D.
The domain of Payroll turns out to be an incredible complex business domain. I think Ron Jeffries says it best in his post: http://wiki.c2.com/?WhyIsPayrollHard
The software design of such a complex business domain at scale turns out to be an incredibly hard engineering challenge, and something that is often overlooked when we think about big engineering challenges.
A little known fact is XP and Agile were developed by Kent Beck while working on a Payroll system for Chrysler (In fact, Kent now works at Gusto to help us with our payroll system).
The market's been really good for software engineers in the past 10 years. It's absolutely none of my business, and I don't want to be rude. But I hope you go out and make hay my friend. You could easily be making twice that, even in low CoL states.
This argument makes no sense. You making $X/year has no bearing on how another company pays its employees. There are people in Bangladesh making shirts for $5/day so why would I pay you $1000/day to make websites? Well maybe because that's the going rate for the area and you can generally buy higher quality labor with more money...
> You making $X/year has no bearing on how another company pays its employees.
Yes it does, because I and many many many many other people are doing fine on one amount outside of the Bay Area. My job equates to effectively any non-coding job that they have, someone was trying to claim that every employee costs 100-200k, I pointed out that is patently false and gave my income as an example.
When I pointed that out then it changed to "oh yeah but rent costs 200 million!"
No.
I've still seen exactly zero sensible explanation in this entire thread as to why a payroll company felt he need to raise 200 million in funding, and why any sane investor would provide such an amount.
Let's say an employee DID cost 150k after salary, benefits, and a year of their share of the building rent though, 200 million dollars gets you:
- 1333 employees for 1 year
Pretty sure that a payroll company doesn't need 1,333 costing 150k just to grow/become profitable.
Pretty sure they don't need 100 employees costing 150k each to do so, even if they do that's 13 years of money, er sorry 'runway'. I highly doubt they're going to hire 100 software engineers.
But hey, I'm not a VC so I guess my question is silly to everyone here.
So I'll point out that the people investing the money, that some of them are also scratching their heads and concerned about such:
It's fully loaded costs, an employee is a lot more expensive than just the yearly salary. Looks like they're expanding to NYC so definitely closer to $200k.
My 34k salary does not cost my company 200k, I don't know what benefits you get but for me to cost my company that they'd have to feed me multiple times every day (worth pointing out here, most companies do not provide ANY food or drink outside of tap water) and give me a phone and a car and a bonus or four and I probably still wouldn't get close to costing them 100k. Most people don't make 100k, or anything close to it. The median HOUSEHOLD income in 2016 in the United States was $60,309. Again, household.
The median household income in my state (Indiana) was $54,181 in 2017.
It's my experience many people on HN generally have no clue what most of the country makes.
>The costs to this point (basic salary, employment taxes and benefits) are typically in the 1.25 to 1.4 times base salary range
To -user5994461-, I can't reply directly to you but:
Commercial real estate is pretty cheap in most of the country, we have 3 shifts in my building and are open almost 6 days a week, sharing desks with another shift, my company isn't paying thousands of dollars per person per year for this building.
Not every place is the bay area with insanely expensive rent and insanely expensive cost of living.
I've still seen exactly no one even attempt to explain to me why a payroll company needed to raise 200 million dollars.
I'm making 62% of my state's -household- median income. This is the problem with HN, everyone thinks that everyone in America makes 100-200k. Minimum wage is 7.25 and there are TONS of minimum wage workers.
Median full-time salary is between 40k for females and 51k for males. You're being underpaid for 13 years experience, especially if you're working in tech.
No one assumes everyone makes 100-200k, but since most people here work in tech of some sort, 34k is unheard of.
It seems like a good product, though I always get very uneasy by companies that have extreme company cultures. If you work there, you can’t wear shoes in the office (to give the feeling of being at home?) and apparently you need to change your LinkedIn headline to say you “Empower” X or Y. I feel like every blog post I’ve ever seen from this company is about their “mission-driven culture.”
Can we go back to a time where employees aren’t asked to be 100% emotionally attached to their work, in ways like this that are clearly made more extreme by the company itself?
In Finland it is common for people to remove shoes indoors - I guess walking through slush/ice/snow in winters makes that a good habit - and that often extends to company-offices.
Of course outside there it would seem a little odd to many, I'm sure. Though sliding around polished floor, in your socks? Never gets old. Maybe I'm just a child..
When I lived in a city in the US that had regular snow and ice, floors inside of the buildings were never slushy/dirty, despite everyone wearing the same shoes inside and outside (businesses only, inside my house I always take them off no matter the time of the year).
However, back when I lived in Russia, we had to bring an indoor pair of shoes to get changed into, as everything would be covered in a layer of outside of dirt otherwise.
I honestly have no idea why that was happening, but I wanted to make a point that both you and OP can certainly be correct on that one at the same time.
Lithuanian here.Most people would kick you out if you wouldn't take your shoes upon entering their homes. However I'm yet to see an office where people would walk shoeless( to have more comfortable footwear for office use only is acceptable,but no slippers).. Also carpets or carpet flooring isn't something one would normally would see in an office,as opposed to, let's say Britain.Most offices have either tiles,laminate or some other, easy to clean surface. During Autumn or winter,people do clean their shoes well enough before entering premises,so no snow or water is brought to the office,as not doing so is a big no no and is frown upon in most cases.
Right, but it's not weird there when everyone does it. This would be analogous to a "Change the world" company in Finland requiring everyone to walk around in the office in their full snow shoes.
One of my colleagues wears only happy socks during Winter, no shoes. It’s great because there always something to talk about whenever people bump into him.
I do have a set of black socks with weekdays written on them. I usually grab a random pair in the morning and go to work.I did have quite a few comments that I'm not wearing the right socks for the day,i.e. Friday socks on Tuesday,etc.:)
I once almost worked at a beer company where they would literally ask you on your interview which was your favorite beer. This was a mass-produced, cheap lager like Budweiser, so clearly it could not be anyone's favorite beer... but apparently if you didn't say their product was the best you couldn't get a job there.
I straight up lied in my interview and accepted the eventual job offer, only to renege on it after getting an offer from another company literally halfway through my first day on the job...
The question is fairly bad, but reneging on the offer on your first day on the job isn't all peachy either.
Perhaps it would've been better to hold off on accepting until you have had the responses from every potential employer (Source: have had people not show up on their first day of work way too often)
This is exactly my feeling. Gusto just comes across as a nauseatingly virtue-signaling company (another is Lyft which I found out when I interviewed with them).
I read an interview somewhere by Joshua Reeves, and he seemed to answer every question like he was Tony Robbins or some top-level guru. Dude, I don't want your life advice, tell me how to run a profitable company.
Silicon Valley tech is overtaken by this need to project wokeness. That's one big reason I wanna leave this place and work for a more blue-collar tech place. Don't know where that exists.
(I am non-white, and an immigrant, so don't be quick to accuse me of extremist views)
>That's one big reason I wanna leave this place and work for a more blue-collar tech place
I'm guessing you'll quickly find that a "blue-collar tech place" isn't quite the panacea you expect. There's a reason no one in Silicon Valley pines for traditional corporate culture. Because it sucks really bad. Putting up with some faux-wokeness is a small price to pay to get away from it.
Partially agree. I have no inclination to work for IBM or corporate software. Just wanna work for a startup where I can crack non PC jokes. Where the company hires for competence and not because they wanna show off that they hire 50% women.
I feel like there's a big gap between "our mission is to save the word with payroll software"-esque virtue signalling, and a "PC" culture. 99% of the time, "politically correct" === "polite and respectful of boundaries."
Well, okay, one example of PC culture is sensitivity towards microaggressions. Based on your previous comment, you're probably already rolling your eyes, but bear with me. Microaggressions are usually (and very broadly) defined as actions which unintentionally marginalize people. These actions are almost never noticed by the person at fault -- that's what makes them "micro." Examples include things like calling a black colleague "aggressive" when they're arguing -- that particular language has been applied to black people for a long, long time to cast them as violent or criminal, and thus comes across differently than when applied to a white person.
Anyway, I list that as an example because what you're talking about isn't actually an example of political correctness (which is, again, a shitty term for basic respect and awareness of social context). Humans like black-and-white issues. It's really nice for us to be able to put things in boxes. So when we perceive someone's action in a certain way, our gut instinct is to cast that entire person as that way. Do people sometimes take someone's rudeness (even if accidental) and brand them a racist, discarding all of their opinions? Absolutely. Do some of my family members hear that I voted for Hillary and decide that none of my opinions have value? Also certainly. Humans are dogmatic. "Political correctness" is an umbrella term for cultural sensitivity, and can (like any idea) be applied dogmatically. It is not fundamentally dogmatic.
You are right. But I'm also spending 40 hours a week at work. It's not that I wanna make lewd jokes all the time. It's just that, I wanna feel that if I say something that isn't appropriate, I don't' wanna be excoriated. I have a darker sense of humor and so I don't wanna feel like I'm walking on eggshells.
> Can we go back to a time where employees aren’t asked to be 100% emotionally attached to their work
When was this? Post-War corporations sported a common uniform. Industrial Era culture was demandingly monotonous and before that we’re talking about guilds and their customs.
Broadly speaking, there are benefits at multiple levels to having a cohesive company culture (including eclectic traditions). We’re just seeing more variety in those traditions.
When I was a kid in the early 1970s, my dad took my brother and me to his workplace sometimes on Saturdays. There I interacted with machinists, electronics techs and at least one engineer. Also my dad was an engineering manager.
It was definitely common and acceptable for the machinists, techs, engineers and manager to say that they would rather be doing something else than working or that they would rather have a job more glamorous than working with machines and pieces of steel. In other words, back then, you had to do your job or risk getting fired, but AFAICT there was no risk to admitting that you didn't like doing your job. In fact, if you went around telling people you really liked your job, my guess is you probably would've been viewed as at least slightly socially inept for being unwilling to engage in the small rituals that lubricated social interactions -- or more precisely for getting one of the common rituals backwards.
This was at a large machine-tool manufacturer in Massachusetts. In something I read or heard IIIRC, this manufacturer was referred to as the IBM of machine tools. The owner of a motorcycle store (which employed many motorcycle mechanics) revealed in conversation with me that he considered being a machinist at this employer to be a particularly good job.
In contrast, does anyone reading this doubt that nowadays if a programmer in Silicon Valley tells his boss that he/she doesn't like his job or doesn't like working as a programmer, he/she risks getting fired unless he/she knows his/her boss at least reasonably well?
For most of the time I really do love my job but even in the senior management meetings I'm very open about the fact that I'd drop it all at once and would do something completely different if there was no need to earn for living. Everyone is cool about it because the head of sales would rather play golf,one CEO would probably spend even more time traveling the world while the other would probably spend even more time playing FPS. Maybe I just happen to work where people don't drink their own kool-aid..
I am not surprised some very skilled blue collar heavy engineering jobs could be very lucrative.
One example is "suddenly working to rule" just before a major delivery and getting paid back handers off the books for example. This is an example told to me by a hr/ir professional who came from Clydeside
Conversely, I've heard stories of car manufacturer workers keying cars of other employees who drove in cars of other brands. Not every company nowadays is nutty, but then again, it happened back in the day, too.
You can wear your shoes in the Gusto office. A good number of us do; in fact I'm doing so right now. I think it's more that you have the option and encouragement to walk around freely without shoes, whereas other offices would probably frown on you for going into a meeting with just socks.
Some employees wear their SF street shoes in the office, and they still encourage other employees to not wear them?
One of the reasons I never applied at Gusto is that I didn't want to take off my shoes. The floor is a commons, and it only takes one person walking around with shoes on to turn it from a "no shoes floor" to a "shoes floor".
Of the people who take off their shoes, 99% of them wear slippers or indoor shoes of some sort. The rest who wear socks don't seem to care about the floor either way. As a sidenote, shoe policy is a really terrible barometer for whether or not to apply to a company, regardless of how little it may have influenced your decision. I can't imagine you actually took it into consideration.
> shoe policy is a really terrible barometer for whether or not to apply to a company
Any kind of behavior that gives me the feeling of kool-aid drinking or brainwashing is absolutely a red flag.
The way you describe it (not enforced in any way, not even through peer pressure) is very different from the way I had always read about it (fairly absolutist and you won't be allowed in the building if you don't remove your shoes). If I had heard about it that way, you're right, I would not take it into consideration.
Unfortunately I don't have citations handy for the absolutist version of the policy that I had read about.
I'd say every company does kool-aid drinking or "brainwashing" (kind of a strong way of putting it IMO) of some sort. I think most rational people don't take it too seriously, and engage at a minimal level when necessary. Do you have companies in mind that, in your opinion, don't raise any red flags for you in terms of kool-aid drinking?
And if you're still looking for a new job, feel free to consider us again! We promise you can keep your shoes on :)
I know someone who works there for 3.5 years and going strong. I was curious about this, so I just went to look on LinkedIn, and they did not have the word "Empower" on their profile a single time. FWIW
Yikes. I hear ya brother. Was not raised in it, but my aunt owned a private 'applied scholastics' school and I was a student there for a few years. What a trip that was.
To be clear, no shoes in the office thing was started because the streets of SF are super dirty.
I hear you on the empower language. It’s always sounded a bit forced to me but I see what they’re going for. Managers should focus on helping their reports be successful rather than getting into management because they want power or status or whatever. Which isn’t to say that renaming titles with fix that, but it is one small communication of what’s important to leadership.
They're not. People in SF act like SF streets are literally shit stained all over. In all likelihood, it's probably pretty comfortable to not wear shoes in an office haha.
I'm not sure if you're in SF or, if so, where you live/work but having lived in SOMA and the Mission, I regularly see people peeing and defecating on the street. Happened last week on the same block as Tartine, so this isn't some "bad part of town" thing either. Whole blocks regularly smell like urine. Actually this happened yesterday, I was walking right near the Asian Art Museum.
SF is not a clean city. Streets don't have to be 100% shit stained to think that maybe taking off your shoes before coming into the office is a not-so-bad idea.
I'm fine with this as long as they're clear about it up-front.
If every employee is emotionally invested in the company you can imagine that they don't want to hire new folks that aren't - there would be huge culture clashes. Some people live to work, even if it's not for their own company. Why not let them all work with each other?
I've found it's only a problem when companies promise "Work-life balance is a priority" then on the first day you notice everyone's there at 8pm. At least if they're up-front about it you know what you're getting in to and can adjust expectations in terms of both time commitment and salary accordingly.
Wait, the “no shoes” thing is mandatory? I remember reading about it, but thought it was optional. Still creepy.
Either way, like you said, I wouldn’t work for them for the same reason — obsessive company culture, which indicates a poor work/life balance. They clearly want the kool-aid drinkers.
In the Bay Area where opportunities abound and switching jobs is easy, companies need a way to brainwash you and help you settle into a nice cocoon so that employees don't consider leaving. If it feels like a job, any job is fine. If it feels like home or like a family, you wouldn't want to leave, would you? Companies without a strong culture or with a traditional culture experience a high rate of attrition at the hint of the slightest bad news.
Oh good! I love Gusto, and their customer service has been stellar.
I hope this allows them to get into more areas of payroll that I hate dealing with, like worker's comp insurance, or just managing my insurance for employees in general. That's my biggest sticking point, especially since I have people working in multiple states.
Would love to see the API open up/be offered again!
We don’t use Quickbooks, but currently we are hacking the Quickbooks export with a bunch of JSON in the configuration UI, to provide extra context and more detail for team breakdowns, etc.
Is that new? Last year I had an employee in Washington and I had to call the State of Washington to set it up, for example. If it's new, that great! You should have told me. :)
Then maybe we aren't talking about the same thing. When I added an employee in Washington, I had to apply online and then call them directly to get the employee set up. One of the things I had to do was buy Worker's Comp insurance through the State of Washington, because no one else will sell it. Also, I had to get my UBI number from them.
Ideally I would tell you guys "I have a new employee in Washington!" and that would be the end of the story, you'd do all the rest. That's what I'm hoping you can get to at least!
(To be clear, the part you can do today is already amazing and super helpful, I'm just being greedy because I'd rather spend time on product than on calling the State of Washington
Now you just need health insurance in all 50 states.. maybe build up association health plans that cross state lines by industry, etc. The lack of health insurance for small businesses is such a devil, and keeps so many people from even trying to go out on their own. Really our only options start at about the 5 employee mark, and even then the rates are often not much better than the individual market (which is more than a house payment in many states).
I’m happy for them, seemed like an interesting company. Personally I had a bad experience with them as far as their recruiting went. As a very experienced candidate I was working with a senior recruiter who thought I was perfect for a position, however hearing my compensation requirements said he had to check in and get back to me. I never received a response. Perfectly fine with it not being a good match, but have the common decency to have some kind of response.
I've never understood this behaviour. Is it because they don't want to send any official communication stating that they don't want to/cannot match your compensation request? Is it just bad blood? No idea.
90% of the time it's just because people are busy and have a god-awful amount of crap on their plate. They figure your interest will time out gracefully.
No idea, but it is obviously rude, but also in the current “lack of engineering talent” climate a very bad business practice. I have worked for a couple of FAANG and other large companies, and been rejected by many more. But they have always responded after the interview process began.
One thing I don't like about Gusto is a platform lock-in for new features. We've been a customer since before there were health benefits available (and now have no intent to switch). Things we've been asking about like HSA contributions or prorated benefits were eventually added - but only if you use Gusto's own program. That's annoying...
Whenever I work in a company that uses Gusto for payroll and benefits, I breathe much easier as an employee. It's easy and out of your way. Please send the design team love and compliments from me. A+
Good for them. Used them for startup a few years ago. Worked really well and super simple to use when all employees were in a single state and we only utilized their payroll services. Once we started venturing into offering health insurance to employees though and our employees spread across multiple states / countries we were not able to customize the plans to our liking (we had some very specific ideas about how we wanted to subsidize insurance) and ended up switching to different provider. We ended up trading the nice Gusto (ZenPayroll) interface for a much more clunky one and most likely a higher premium, but the other provider was able to customize our packages without us having to devote much time to it, which at that point was worth the trade off. I'm sure Gusto has improved hence, and I would likely give them another try today as needed. By the way, for those switching payroll providers, in my experience it is better to do either on a quarter end or year end - while not necessary by any means, it can make it easier to gather all needed documents in case there are tax questions down the road.
nope (re being sure their ability to handle health benefits has improved)... just used them for a startup and their response to questions about integration with health benefits was essentially (3 days later) - um, we don't do that, but we'd be happy to sell your name to a broker.
agree the interface is pretty, but failure to really support benefits will be a dealbreaker for many startup/small business folks.
Thanks for the input. I was assuming things may have improved since I last used them a few years ago. My experience was similar to what you mentione above, back then. This may save me some time evaluating options for future ventures.
Very exciting to see more companies open up prod + engineering divisions in NYC - I feel as though typical bay area tech satellite NYC offices are go-to-market focused first before expanding out to prod/eng so interesting to see Gusto go the other way first!
- international employees (US, European countries)
- better support for employees across-states (they already do many things well in this regard)
- taxes
- general accounting
- atlas-type stuff (bank, incorporation)
- maybe a specialized account manager / team to handle the above (I guess it'd be region-based CPA/lawyers?)
Some of those are sophisticated things, but having one hub to view/manage it all from the top down would save oodles of time.
Aside: Gusto's support has been very helpful, even as an employee, when I contacted them directly they went out of their way to help me solve a payment issue.
>What R&D does a payroll provider do? (Genuine question)
Halfway down the Techcrunch article, Joshua Reeves mentions what "R&D" in NYC intends to work on:
- While Gusto’s central product is payroll, Reeves sees two other product arcs he intends to develop more in the coming years as the company scales. One arc, which we talked about last year, is fintech features like Flexible Pay, a product that allows employees to receive their unpaid wages in advance, with the goal of reducing reliance on usurious payday lenders. The other product arc is health care and helping SMBs offer insurance benefits to their employees. “We want to be a force for universal health care,” Reeves said.
- As Gusto explores additional products built around its payroll service, it has sought to expand its engineering R&D team. The company announced recently that it will open an R&D office in New York City in September, which it hopes will be able to both execute on these two products as well as others not yet planned.
So, another way to state "R&D" is "new product development". Gusto wants to offer more SaaS capability than just plain payroll processing such as short-term loans, health insurance management, and other yet-to-be-disclosed new products. Presumably, in Gusto's slide deck to raise the $200 million, they convinced new investors that the money would be used to build new products.
This is a REALLY good question and something that's hard to appreciate until you actually to build a payroll system. I think a common misnomer is that if you're not doing ML/AI/AR/blockchain/[insert latest technology here], you're not doing R&D.
The domain of Payroll turns out to be an incredible complex business domain. I think Ron Jeffries says it best in his post: http://wiki.c2.com/?WhyIsPayrollHard
The software design of such a complex business domain at scale turns out to be an incredibly hard engineering challenge, and something that is often overlooked when we think about big engineering challenges.
A little known fact is XP and Agile were developed by Kent Beck while working on a Payroll system for Chrysler (In fact, Kent now works at Gusto to help us with our payroll system).
I'm CTO of Flip (https://flip.lease), we handle a lot of rent payments each month.
I get the same question a lot. Most people could not imagine the amount of complexity that exists underneath the seemingly simple guise of paying rent. Just wanted to say I can sympathize and I respect what you've been able to do, specifically from the technical perspective. (We use Gusto and it's been absolutely fantastic)
Unrelated, my whole team was very impressed by the attention to detail in your rebrand. It's so difficult to transition the landing pages and internal product so seamlessly, again coming from the technical perspective. I imagine you're running a tight ship over there, and it shows.
This is an aside, but can we define what a "startup" is? To me, if you have a repeatable business model and have scaled it to thousands of customers, you're no longer a startup.
Is the convention that if you take private investment, then you are a startup?
Now if only there was a company as good as Stripe/Gusto that did accounting+taxes, I'd really be set! I mean, "I give you access to my accounts, (almost) never think about you, and I have a proper set of books and my taxes are fully done every year."