GuidelineReviews of guideline.com

I signed up for Guideline a few years ago. As a very small business (less than 10 employees), I needed a cost effective solution to offer retirement plans to our team. The support team has helped me with many requests over the years, like switching from a regular 401K plan to a Safe Harbor Plan when the time was right. They also helped me stay on track with our profit sharing plan. And, most recently Dan R. helped me get a 401K loan approved quickly. The level of service and commitment to customer will certainly keep my business here for a long time.

Customer service is terrible.

I would give them a 0 star review if I could. The people at Guideline don't care for their customers, all they care about is collecting their fees. I made the mistake of enrolling my start-up with them so that I could offer a 401k through Gusto. However, I soon learned that if I had to pause payroll, or wanted to cancel Guideline, I'd still have to pay the hefty fees for the 401k through Guideline. They were still going to charge me their monthly fees. Well it's been 4 months since I canceled, and they are still trying to charge me for an account that only had 1 employee, and a single payroll that was run once. I can understand if I had 50 employees, but this was a single account with a single deposit. They over drafted my business account and are still trying to charge me for "winding down the plan." It's complete bull, I cancelled on October 1st, but was able to retroactively make it effective July 31, 2022. Yet they have not done a single thing to service or close my account since then. I can log in, and it still looks like it did the day I enrolled in June. They say it takes a "few" months to wind down, but they aren't actually working on my account. They have a FAQ page that says it takes 90 days to terminate the plan so that they can: 1) Notify participants of the plan’s termination. 2) Obtain and process participant distribution instructions. 3) Complete required plan compliance testing. 4) Administer a final plan review. 5) Close the 401(k) trust. and 6) Submit the final Form 5500 filing. I told my employee I was cancelling Guideline, it takes all of 5 seconds for them to generate an automatic message the account is closing. I know because they have email templates that are sent out each time you contact them. So Step 1, should have been done the day I confirmed I was canceling the account. I had to wait 3 days, send 5 emails back and forth, before I was able to and do. They are keeping my employees investment, so step 2 is done. I don't know how long it takes them to run a compliance test for a single transaction, but it shouldn't take 4 months..... My guess is it takes less than a minute, so step 3 should have been done in early October. The same goes for the final plan review, that may take a couple minutes, so step 4 should be done already (it is January 2023 now). Closing the account should take seconds for them to click the button to close the account, so step 5 should have been done in early October as well. This is robbery plan and simple. It takes all of 10–15 minutes to close the account and file the automatic paperwork that their system generates, but yet in the last 4 months none of the numerous customer reps I have emailed or called on the phone have actually closed my account. Oh, and because the account was so small ($30 from my employee, and $12 matched from me), they are eating my employee's small investment, and calling that part of the wind down fees as well. And the final step 6, filing Form 5500 should be automatic, seeing as all their forms are electronically linked. So tell me why they are still trying to charge me for an account that they are purposefully dragging out for none other than to collect additional and unnecessary month service fees for? Guideline is nothing but a thief! Their customer reps send the same copy and pasted reply emails. They probably have a bot auto-responding to my emails, so they can pocket more money from investors. I am so disappointed with the lack of professionalism by Guideline. I am a non-profit business owner, and this kind of greedy tactics make me sick!

User interface is easy to navigate and customer service is quick to respond and knowledgeable. I would very much like to have more freedom to invest my money as I see fit. There are many other ETF's that pay a much better dividend than what I am currently earning.

Absolutely hate that you rebalance. I wish there was an option to turn this off. It seems great in paper if your have investments the all go up or down exactly like you'd want but if you have a bad or couple bad investments it's much harder to spot them and you could end up losing big. For this reason I only use your company to get my match.

Hi , The basic capability of reallocating (selling+buying) money from a specific fund (e. g. a money market fund) to specific other fund(s) on ad hoc basis without changing all future allocations is not available - this is unbelievable, but I called Guideline support and confirmed it a few days ago. Every 401K management company I’ve used through multiple employers in the last 20+ years had this basic capability.

It is very difficult for me to track my contributions by paycheck. I would like to see the breakdown of my paycheck contributions and how much I invested into each fund/ETF. I've used many brokerages and Guideline's tracking tool is sub-par. Also, it is not acceptable for Guideline to wait 7 days or longer to invest my funds. Other brokerages invests into the funds as soon as my paycheck issues.

Simple setup, low cost, awesome integration with Quickbooks online makes additional tasks to run the plan so minimal it takes no time or special experience or knowledge from a small business owner to do. A no-brainer for anyone considering sponsoring a retirement plan. The digital tools available to plan administrator and plan participants are amazing.