GuidelineReviews of guideline.com

Completely unresponsive support. They claim I am behind on my 401k loan despite me sending the payments. When I ask them to explain what is going on, they ignore me. They have been ignoring me for a full month now. Very shady operation! Avoid.

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!

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.

The worst customer service ever.

I've been trying to get a disbursement completed for months. Support emails are never responded to. Updates are never provided. It feels like a black hole.

Trying to close my account and receive all 401k contributions ... I was told it would take 3 - 5 WEEKS for my account to close. It has been five weeks and my account is still active. I was then told Not Contact Anyone further until it had been 3 - 5 MONTHS! There is absolutely no reason for them to continue to keep this account open! I am over the age of 59 1/2 and can withdraw and close at any time with no penalty and yet they refuse to do so!

Deductions were not taken from my account for months due to an error on your end. There was no proactive accountability or review, I was the one who noticed and had to work with my HR dept to resolve. There were no options for how to makeup the difference without having larger deductions from future paychecks.