GuidelineReviews of guideline.com

When I sold my firm, Guideline failed to file IRS paperwork on my employees disbursements, resulting in a fine leveled at me. They knew, but withheld it from me. When I contacted them they admitted the mistake, but when I asked for assistance in contacting the IRS agent they were supposedly negotiating with they refused to tell me. I had hoped that since they supposedly knew of the issues I could get an extension on the deadline. Guideline provided no information despite my advice that I was facing a deadline and mounting threats from the IRS, so I paid the fine. Over $1000. Months later I heard from them advising they reached a settlement. Pathetic. Making a mistake is human. Keeping it from your client shows no integrity. Refusing to assist your client, leaving them in harms way is criminal. Do NOT trust these people.

I set up Guideline for my company 401k in 2021. We stopped using the platform for contributions in 2024. I reached out to Guideline in 2025 noting we have gone a full year with paying monthly fees with no 401k contributions, we requested to close the account. For 16 months following that initial request, Guideline representatives have (1) sent us email steps that lead to no where e.g. log into your account and click on x, we cannot find x in our account (2) when we call, a real person tells us "no one is available so I left a note on your account for them to call you back, or you can call us back". 16 months of calls and emails and more calls and more emails to no avail and employees' 401ks are being held up in a dormant account that cannot be closed. This is the poorest customer service I have ever experienced.

It has taken several months to do an outbound rollover of my retirement funds. Guideline has made it difficult at every single step since they: 1) Only do outbound rollovers via a check and do not support in kind transfers. 2) Require documents such as a Letter of Acceptance to be uploaded by the consumer even though most other investment firms will not release the documents to a consumer. In fact, I had to have another brokerage mail the document to Guideline, call multiple customer service representatives at Guideline until they found a PDF of the letter that they uploaded to my portal so that I could then download it and re-upload it myself! 3) When they finally cut the check, they did not cut the check for the full amount as requested and now I am stuck starting this entire process over again to get my money because of their negligence. 4) They are still collecting excessive fees on the money they improperly left in my account during the rollover. Honestly, I have absolutely nothing good to say about Guideline other than Jessica was the most helpful agent I’ve experienced at any company. Everything else is pretty awful.

We migrated our company 401k to Guideline trusting that it would be an improvement over our prior administrator. Today we received notice of a $16k penalty from the IRS because Guideline failed to file our annual documents on time. They offer no support for this issue but a general email inbox. No person, no account manager, no escalation routes. We thought our prior administrator wasn't a great experience, but at least they always filed on time. Guideline has let us down in a huge way. I regret moving our company to them.

For 6 months they didn't take out the contributions from payroll and I was hit with a half years' bill of contributions that were not being done without any escalation of any size.

The purpose of Guideline is to make it easy for a Small Business to be compliant in order to provide a 401k option to their employees and themselves. However they do not proactively email you about compliance concerns, only post-fact "tasks", putting busy small business owners in the position to fail compliance when they could have made adjustments had Guideline had set up a simple, and arguably dutiful, system to alert users in advance changes need to be made to contributions percentages. Because of the failure to provide this obvious and core reporting service, that they are easily technically able to provide, I have been put in the position of losing thousands of dollars. Their support staff is rude and unconcerned. I would strongly recommend not bothering to offer a 401k with Guideline to save you from being put in a similar position. Perhaps there are other companies that can perform such basic services as proactive communication to use instead. Per conversation with a supervisor, Guideline knows they should provide this feature but opts not to, out of a fake concern of liability. There is no liability to proactively communicate possible compliance issues. Strongly suggest using a different service/provider.

If you are looking for a firm to hold a 401k they can do that but that is about all they can do. Trying to get a detailed transaction report is a joke. Their responsiveness to investors is a joke. Their ability to timely process contributions is a joke. They have an extremely limited amount of funds to invest in. I am both an employer and an employee and this is the worst platform to carry 401k accounts. Based upon my interactions with their staff, they do not have financial professionals but simply Customer Support personnel. Stay away, Stay Far Far Away.

staff is not helpful. great tech but everyone is asleep at the wheel.