Gusto

Gusto started as a payroll product for small businesses and grew into a full people-operations platform that mid-market teams now run as the spine of their HR stack. For a $5M to $50M company with 30 to 200 employees, it is often the only people-data system finance and ops actually rely on. The payroll runs, the W-2s file, the contractors get paid, and most of the compliance work happens in the background.

What Gusto Does

Gusto bundles payroll, benefits, HR and hiring into a single platform built for teams that do not want a dedicated HRIS, payroll provider, benefits broker and onboarding tool stitched together. Everything sits on one employee record.

• Full-service payroll. Automated federal, state and local tax filings, unlimited pay runs, next-day direct deposit on most plans, and built-in support for hourly, salaried and commission pay.
• Contractor payments. Pay US 1099 contractors and international contractors in 120+ countries from the same dashboard, with year-end 1099 forms handled automatically.
• Benefits administration. Health, dental, vision, 401(k), HSA, FSA, commuter and life insurance. Gusto acts as the broker in most states and syncs deductions directly into payroll.
• Hiring and onboarding. Offer letters, e-signed I-9 and W-4 forms, state new-hire reporting, background checks and self-service onboarding tasks before the first day.
• Time tracking and PTO. Hourly time entry, time-off requests and approvals, with hours flowing straight into the next payroll run.
• Performance and talent. On Plus and Premium tiers, performance reviews, goals and surveys run inside the same employee record.
• Reporting and people analytics. Payroll journals, headcount, turnover, comp bands, and customisable reports finance and operations can pull without a People team.

Gusto's AI

Gusto's AI assistant, Gus, runs inside the platform and answers HR and payroll questions in plain English. Operators can ask Gus to summarise time-off requests, pull payroll reports across multiple months, surface compliance questions on exempt versus non-exempt classification, and complete routine tasks like approving PTO or assigning a raise. Gus reads the company's own data, so the answers are specific to the team rather than generic policy text. For a finance leader, the real unlock is reporting. Queries that used to take a People ops analyst an afternoon now run in seconds, and the conversational layer makes the data accessible to anyone who can write a Slack message.

Automations We Build with Gusto

Gusto is excellent at being the system of record for people data. Where teams leave value on the table is the automation layer around it: the hand-offs between ATS, Gusto, accounting, IT provisioning and finance modelling. These are the plays we build for mid-market clients.

• ATS-to-Gusto onboarding. When a candidate moves to Hired in Greenhouse, Lever or Ashby, we create the Gusto employee record, attach the right pay schedule and department, trigger the onboarding checklist and notify the hiring manager in Slack.
• Day-one IT provisioning. New hires in Gusto auto-provision Google Workspace, Slack, Notion, GitHub and Okta access; terminations deprovision them on the same trigger. Finance gets a Slack alert when seat counts change so SaaS billing stays clean.
• Payroll-to-GL sync. Every payroll run posts a structured journal entry into QuickBooks Online or Xero, mapped to the right department and class. We add the variance checks that Gusto's native sync skips.
• Headcount-driven forecasting. We pipe Gusto headcount, comp and burden data into the CFO's planning tool (Cube, Mosaic, a Supabase warehouse or a Google Sheet) so hire-vs-runway models update automatically.
• Slack notifications for People events. New hires, anniversaries, time-off approvals and payroll-run confirmations land in the channels they should land in, instead of email threads no one reads.
• Multi-state compliance dashboard. A live view of which states the team is registered in, where new hires are triggering nexus, and which filings are upcoming. The CFO sees risk before it shows up as a penalty.
• Contractor-to-employee conversion flow. When a 1099 in Gusto crosses the IRS classification threshold or the team decides to convert them, the system flags it, kicks off the W-2 onboarding sequence and updates the finance forecast.

Why Teams Choose Gusto

• One employee record. Payroll, benefits, time and onboarding all share the same person, so deductions, accruals and reporting stay aligned without manual reconciliation.
• Compliance handled in the background. Multi-state tax registration, filings, W-2s and 1099s are baked into the service rather than billed as extras.
• Operator-grade UX. Finance and ops can run payroll without an HR generalist, which matters for teams in the 30 to 200 employee range that have not yet hired a head of People.
• Open API and a deep integration directory. The system is easy to wire into the rest of the stack, which is why most of our automation work plugs in without custom plumbing.
• Predictable pricing. A base fee plus a per-person charge, with no hidden costs for tax filings, year-end forms or new-state registrations.

Gusto integrates natively with QuickBooks Online, Xero, Greenhouse, Lever, Slack, Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, Asana, 15Five, Deel and a long list of time-tracking and 401(k) providers. Plans start at Simple ($49/month + $6 per person), step up to Plus ($80/month + $12 per person) and Premium ($180/month + $22 per person). The Plus tier is where most mid-market teams land. The configuration and the automation layer around it is the build we do, so Gusto stops being a payroll tool and starts being the people-data spine of the business.