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."
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.
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.
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.
[0] https://support.gusto.com/benefits/other-benefits/payroll-de...
It pained me to return to ADP, but I had no choice. My employees would not be excited if I made the choice to return to Gusto.
My only gripe is that I liked the old name (ZenPayroll) better :P
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?!
This stuff always blows my mind.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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...
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)
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)
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.
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.
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?
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".
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.
How are the streets so dirty you can't wear shoes inside commercial building?
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.
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.
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.
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.
If you're interested in chatting again, I hope to make this right. Feel free to email me directly: john.kempe@gusto.com
Ended up going with Square Payroll which supports my model AND does it all for no monthly fee.
agree the interface is pretty, but failure to really support benefits will be a dealbreaker for many startup/small business folks.
- 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.
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.
(side note: I didn't downvote your comment.)
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 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.
Congrats on the raise!
Is the convention that if you take private investment, then you are a startup?
I've wanted to see the financials for a while. Show us the numbers, Josh!
https://engineering.gusto.com describes some of their experiences with it.
