Best Payroll Software for Small Businesses

Payroll is a list of employees who receive compensation from a business or company. It is the total of all compensation a business must pay to its employees for a set period of time or on a given date.

You’ve started your business, and now you’re at the point where you’re ready to hire a few new employees and set up payroll.

It’s a big milestone for you — and you’ve created a job for someone else. How cool is that?

As exciting as growing can be, it comes with a new set of challenges. Whether your team is big, small, in-person, or remote, Gusto has the payroll, benefits, and hiring tools you need, all in one place.

What is Gusto?

Gusto is a reliable payroll software that allows you to automate simple to complicated payroll activities for both employees and contractors. It simplifies the process of onboarding new staff and helps you eliminate manual errors. It's the tool you want in your corner to ensure your payroll routine works well, thanks to its user-friendly approach to payroll management.

Gusto is a top online payroll provider for small businesses. This means it includes all of the necessary payroll tools and combines them with automation to offer a quick, dependable, and flawless payroll process. It includes a number of pay schedule options, assists in the management of employee benefits, and automatically calculates and files payroll taxes.

We can attest to Gusto because it is the tool we use to ensure that everyone of our employees is paid correctly and on time every time.

Getting started with Gusto is a simple three steps

Create a Gusto account - It’s free to start. Tell us about your business and we’ll find the best plan for your needs.

Add your people - Enter your employees into Gusto. They can even self-onboard to save you time.

Run your first payroll - Once we have your employee and tax info, you can run payroll in just a few clicks.

What Your Business will Benefit with Gusto

Gusto is an award-winning and No 1 rated HR platform for payroll, benefits, and more. No matter the size or stage of your business, Gusto’s all-in-one HR platform puts the tools you need to hire, pay, and manage your team at your fingertips.

Here are reasons why you should use Gusto for your business:

1. Full-service Payroll

Gusto's full-service approach to payroll guarantees you have the tools you need to manage payroll with a few clicks while taking advantage of its automated capabilities. Besides assisting you in managing employee payments, it also allows you to handle critical HR activities, manage employee benefits, and reduce inaccurate tax filings.

With Gusto, payroll takes just a few clicks. Plus, Gusto automatically files your taxes, helps with compliance, and identifies tax credits to help save you the money you may never have known you qualified for.

With Gusto's full-service payroll, you gain complete access to the following:

• Unlimited payroll that runs for no extra charge
• State tax registration in all 50 states
• Local, state, and federal payroll tax filing for all employees
• International contractor payments in over 80 countries
• Automatic tax calculations
• Time tracking synced with payroll
• Direct deposits

2. Full Employee benefits :

Set your business apart with benefits that make a real difference. Supporting your employees is more important than ever, which is why Gusto provides a wide range of health and financial benefits to help your team thrive.

With Gusto's employee benefit, you gain access to the following:

Health benefits

Do you need to manage medical, dental, and vision insurance, as well as 401(k)s and health reimbursements? Gusto can simply assist you in onboarding employees to a benefits plan that you create based on your team's budget and size.

If you already provide benefits, Gusto will transfer your plan for you. Gusto will auto-deduct from your payroll once the employees are on board, making benefit management easy.

Whether you’re looking for a new broker or want to bring over your existing one, Gusto will help you create a healthcare package that checks all the boxes.

Here are some benefits your business stands to gain with Gusto:

• Medical, dental, life, and vision insurance
• Trusted benefits advisors
• HSA and FSA
• Guidance around new regulations and deadlines

Financial benefits

Help your team plan for the future with pre-tax savings, clear breakdowns of each paycheck, and smart financial tools to set them up for success.

• 401(k) retirement savings
• Workers’ comp
• Gusto Wallet employee finance tools
• 529 college savings

Time and Attendance Tracking

Save time with tools that automatically sync with payroll.

With Gusto’s automated time tools, your team’s hours, PTO, holidays, and more are automatically calculated and entered. Gusto even integrates with the latest time-tracking software and helps you stay compliant.

Whether you operate with remote or hourly employees, Gusto's time-tracking tools come in handy. Its employee time monitoring solutions ensure that everyone's time is logged and computed automatically into payroll. You may also leverage Gusto's accounting integrations with programs like Xero or Quickbooks to make job costing easier.

Learn more about time and attendance

Here are some benefits of using Gusto's service:

• Mobile time tracking with geolocation
• Overtime alerts
• Time-off requests and approvals
• Project tracking and
• cost reports
• PTO policies and reporting
• Leading time-tracking software integrations

Hiring and onboarding

A more effective way to hire, onboard, and retain talent. Today’s job market is competitive. Gusto makes it easier to stand out, grow your team, and support each employee from day 1 to day 1,000.

With Gusto Hiring Solution, you gain access to the following:

• Job postings
• Custom onboarding checklists
• Document e-signing and storage
• Integrations with the latest recruiting software
• Applicant tracking system
• App provisioning with a single click
• Offer letter template

Talent management

Gusto helps unlock your team’s potential with built-in performance tools.

Keeping your team engaged is crucial—especially working remotely. Give your employees a clear path for growth with performance reviews, training, developmental tools, and more.

Learn more about Gusto's talent management

With Gusto Talent management, you gain access to the following:

• Automated feedback requests
• Learning and development tools
• Performance review templates
• Personalized employee communications

Insights and reporting

Create an amazing workplace with actionable data and insights. No more guessing games. Use competitive compensation tools, employee feedback surveys, and workforce costing to make important decisions a lot easier for your business.

Learn more about Gusto's insights and reporting

With Gusto's insight and reporting, you gain access to the following:

• Access to HR experts
• Workforce and project costing
• Competitive compensation tools
• Compliance checklists
• Automatic custom reports
• Anonymous feedback surveys
• Automated tax credit identification
• Law and regulation alerts

Integrations

Gusto easily integrates with all your favorite apps and data and puts them together in one place.

Life’s easier when systems talk. Gusto helps you connect with today’s top software — and is always building more integrations to stay ahead.

Why Gusto Stands Out from Other Payroll Services

Gusto as a payroll, HR, and benefits solution stands out from other providers through the following :

1. Gusto offers comprehensive hiring and onboarding tools for businesses: Gusto's capabilities extend beyond payroll calculation. It makes hiring and onboarding less time-consuming by allowing you to develop onboarding checklists, issue offer letters, and sign and save all of your onboarding documentation online.

Once you've configured your onboarding workflow to work with your HR team, you can wave goodbye to all of the old-school onboarding paperwork.

2. Employees' self-service tools: Gusto offers your HR personnel some freedom by empowering your employees with employee self-service capabilities. Employees who have been onboarded can access their pay stubs and crucial tax papers online, request time off, and update their personal information as it changes.

3. Employees Finance Tool: One of our favorite Gusto features is how much the company thought about the employees throughout the whole payroll process. With Gusto Wallet, employees can keep track of their payments with financial tools that help them save and track where they’re spending every penny. Gusto even offers an optional employee debit card for faster and easier access to funds.

3. Automatic Tax Filing: Whether you work with a fully remote, in-house, or hybrid team, Gusto makes sure your state and federal tax filings stay up-to-date and accurate with its automated tax filing process. It helps lessens the risk of error-prone manual filings and stays up to date with any changing tax laws, so your business avoids those dreaded IRS fees.

4. Varied pay schedule frequencies: Gusto gives you choices in the pay schedule department. You can create varied pay schedules for different employees on a weekly, bi-weekly, semi-monthly, monthly, quarterly, or annual basis. Only a few other payroll solutions on the market can boast the same.

5. Helps you build custom reports: With Gusto, you can easily download a PDF or CSV of your preferred report— whether that’s a payroll report customizable by pay range, state, date, earnings, or job codes, or you want to take a quick look at your company contribution amounts with a benefits report.

Additional reports include (but aren’t limited to) agency payments, bank transactions, year-to-date reports, pay stubs, employee summary reports, contractor payments, and time-off balances.

6. Great user experience: Robust tools that come with a lot of useful features can often be clunky to use and non-intuitive. Gusto’s pages and dashboards are easy to navigate, intuitive, and don’t slow you down with a crowded interface. This is true for both the payroll management side and the employee-facing features.

7. Offers a contractor-only option: If you want to use Gusto, but you only work with contractors, you don’t need to pay a base price for tools you don’t need. Gusto offers a contractor-only plan that gives you access to unlimited contractor payments, contractor self-service, and the ability to create 1099 forms and file them.

8. Integrates with popular business software: Gusto integrates with business tools you’re probably already using. This includes Zero, ZipBooks, Sheets, Slack, Shopify, and Hubstaff, just to name a few.

9. Responsive customer support: Gusto doesn’t leave you high and dry once you’re onboarded into their systems. Regardless of the plan you choose, you get access to trained professionals standing by to help you troubleshoot and answer any questions.

10. Automated reminders: Managing payroll can be a lot to have on your plate, especially as your team grows. Gusto Payroll uses automation for some of its more robust features and sets up and sends you reminders when a deadline is approaching or something needs to get done.

Cons of using Gusto's Platform

Geo-tracking is not available: Geo-tracking is useful if you manage hourly field personnel or collaborate with remote teams. If this describes you and you still want to utilize Gusto as your payroll tool of choice, you may need to consider incorporating a geo-tracking service.

There is no mobile app: Despite its flexibility, Gusto does not yet have a mobile app version for on-the-go payroll and personnel management. Hopefully, this will be available soon.

There are no worldwide payroll features: Gusto does not have any international features. It is only available to employees in the United States. If you are looking for a Global payroll solution for your business or company, click here to check out Deel.

Some integration limitations: Gusto comes with a variety of integrations for time tracking, payroll, accounting, and business operations. Some users, however, wish Gusto was linked with tools like Office 365.

Gusto Pricing

Gusto offers relatively affordable plans for small to medium-sized businesses or even bigger. Once you pay a base price, you pay a small amount per employee depending on the features you want access to.

Gusto works with a flat monthly payment plan based on how feature-rich you want your Gusto experience to be. From there, you pay an additional fee per employee a month. While Gusto isn’t a payroll solution that necessarily competes on price like others might, its set of features are still relatively affordable for both smaller and growing businesses.

Here’s a rundown of those pricing tiers:

Contractor – $0 per month base price plus $6 a month per person

Simple – $40 per month base price plus $6 a month per person

Plus – $80 per month base price plus $12 a month per person

Premium– Contact sales

Smaller teams can get away with Gusto’s Simple plan since it comes with full-service payroll for single-state employers. It also comes with basic HR and onboarding features that are sufficient for smaller teams.

Plus subscriptions include automated payroll for multi-state employers, as well as special permission features, time tracking tools, and document management solutions. All of these features become very helpful at scale.

Large organizations will want to take advantage of Gusto’s Premium plan. Not only does it come with access to certified HR professionals, but you also get access to project management and workforce tracking tools, special permission settings, and an HR resource center.

The beauty of Gusto is that it also has a plan for solopreneurs and much smaller teams that work on a contract basis. Its Contractor tier gives you access to the essentials: unlimited contractor payments, contractor self-service, and the ability to file and distribute 1099s, all for a low $6 fee per person per month and no flat monthly charge.

This is a great option for businesses that want all the perks of using Gusto but don’t need access to more robust tools.

Gusto For Accountants

Besides offering full-service payroll solutions that include HR, time tracking, benefits tracking, employee self-service, and hiring tools, Gusto also offers accountant partnerships.

Once you sign up, you can get up to 20% revenue share and client discounts. You can also earn CPE credits from Gusto’s live webinars to go toward professional certifications. Gusto for accountants is designed for accountants to dole out professional services to their clients with its slew of business tools.

When you sign up, the number of clients you serve will determine the tools you need. With Gusto’s accountant partnership, you get access to more flexible payment plans for both you and your clients, as well as a dedicated representative to answer questions.

Gusto's Position in the Market

While some payroll systems are middle-tier options that simply help you with the fundamentals, Gusto goes above and beyond to provide a top-tier full-service solution to help you streamline your payroll needs. It's easy to understand why.

It includes a slew of tools to assist you handle some of your most pressing payroll issues and automate time-consuming chores like filing state taxes. You simply can't go wrong with Gusto when you consider how simple it is to use and how many employee tools are included.

It's extremely simple to set up if you work with Gusto. If you do get into problems, skilled professionals are always on hand to assist you.

Conclusion

Overall, Gusto is an easy-to-use, all-in-one human resources (HR) platform that helps small and big businesses handle payroll, employee benefits, hiring, onboarding, time and attendance, and compliance.

Without a shadow of a doubt, it's a strong payroll management solution that goes beyond the fundamentals while being reasonably priced. It automates many repetitive activities in every business's employee benefit, HR, and payment administration demands.

Though it has its own set of advantages and disadvantages, just like any other payroll system, the advantages greatly exceed the disadvantages in more ways than one. Ready to start using Gusto? Click here to start.