10 Things You Didn't Know Gusto Could Do
Gusto is our preferred payroll solution. We are a long time Gusto Partner and we recommend it to our customers.
That preference came the hard way. We have run payroll on a lot of platforms over the past decade. Most of them feel like they were built a long time ago and never rethought. The screens are crowded. Support passes you from one department to another. A simple change takes a phone call and a week of waiting.
Gusto is the modern payroll experience. It was built for the owner or office manager who runs payroll every other Friday rather than for a specialist who does it all day.
Payroll is what Gusto is known for. It is also where most businesses stop. They get it set up, run the first payroll, and never look much further.
The platform does considerably more than that. Most of it sits switched off until someone turns it on. Almost all of it is easier to set up correctly at the beginning than to go back and fix two years later.
What you'll learn
- Tablet time clock with GPS
- Labor tracked by project
- Multi-state and global payroll
- Hiring and onboarding
- Health insurance brokerage
- A 401(k) with no minimum
- HSAs, FSAs, and commuter benefits
- Pay as you go workers' comp
- R&D and payroll tax credits
- Gusto payroll inside Xero
Plus one good reason you might not want Gusto at all.
1. Turn any tablet into a time clock
Time Kiosk lets you mount a tablet by the door and have your team punch in and out on it. No separate hardware. No vendor contract. The hours flow straight into payroll.
This works well for a shop floor, a warehouse entrance, a kitchen, or a job site trailer. Anywhere your people do not sit at a computer.
GPS is available too. Team members can record their location when they clock in. Gusto is careful about how it positions this. The point is knowing where the work happened, not watching where someone goes at lunch. Employees can still edit their own timesheets. If you have crews moving between sites, that location stamp answers a lot of questions before they turn into arguments.
Scheduling lives in the same place. You can build shifts around availability and approved time off, compare what you scheduled against what people actually worked, and see overtime forming before it lands in a payroll run. Break rules can be set by state, including which breaks are paid and whether early clock-ins are allowed.
2. Track labor by project and send it to your books
This is the one we push hardest and the one that gets used least.
Salaried and hourly employees can both track hours to specific projects. Gusto then shows you what each project actually cost in labor, counting benefits alongside wages instead of base pay by itself. Departments, jobs, and projects sync to QuickBooks Online and Xero.
For most businesses labor is the largest single input to gross margin. When all of it sits in one bucket on the income statement, you get one company wide margin number and very little else. You cannot see which customers are profitable. You cannot see which service lines are carrying the others.
Turning this on gives you the labor half of job costing without buying another system. Add the materials and subcontractor costs already sitting in your accounting system and you have real gross margin by job. That is where most profitability problems in a growing business are hiding.
3. Pay people in other states and other countries
Remote hiring created a payroll tax problem that catches businesses off guard. An employee moves to a new state and the company now has a registration and filing obligation there. Nobody notices until much later.
Gusto flags the new state registration requirement when it happens and can handle the paperwork for you. That single alert prevents a mess that is easy to miss and expensive to unwind.
Contractors are covered too. You can pay contractors in more than 120 countries with no monthly per contractor fee. They onboard themselves. If you use overseas developers, designers, or support staff, this replaces whatever wire transfer routine you built to get around the problem.
4. Run your hiring and onboarding
Gusto includes an applicant tracking system. You can write a job post, push it out to boards like LinkedIn and Indeed, and manage every candidate in one queue. Offer letter templates are built in.
Onboarding runs on checklists you build once. New hires sign documents electronically, pick their benefits, and get software accounts provisioned. Background checks run through Checkr without leaving the platform.
Beyond hiring there are performance review templates, goal tracking, anonymous employee surveys, an employee handbook builder, and training courses. Certified HR professionals are available for the questions that come up when you have thirty employees and nobody with an HR title.
5. Act as your health insurance broker
Gusto is a licensed insurance broker. You can shop medical, dental, and vision plans inside the platform. There are far more options in there than you will ever need to look through, across most of the carriers you would expect to see.
When Gusto is your broker, benefits administration costs nothing extra. You pay the premiums and that is it. Open enrollment, renewals, life events, and carrier paperwork all happen in the same system that runs payroll. Deductions land in every payroll run automatically, so nobody is matching a carrier invoice against a spreadsheet at month end.
If you like your current broker you can keep them and integrate your existing plans instead. One thing to know going in. Gusto benefits require an active Gusto payroll account, so this is not something you can use on its own.
6. Set up a 401(k) with no minimum headcount
Retirement plans have a reputation for being complicated and expensive to administer. That reputation is out of date for a business this size.
Gusto has no headcount minimum. A business with nothing but an owner can start a plan. Deductions sync with payroll automatically and compliance testing runs during the year instead of arriving as a surprise.
There is a compliance reason to look at this now. A growing number of states have put retirement savings requirements on the books for employers, and some of them reach very small businesses. Gusto can tell you whether your state is one of them and what your choices are if it is.
7. Administer HSAs, FSAs, commuter benefits, and disability coverage
Gusto handles health savings accounts, flexible spending accounts, dependent care FSAs, and commuter benefits. Life insurance, short term disability, and long term disability are available the same way health insurance is, at premium cost with no administration fee stacked on top.
These are inexpensive additions to a compensation package. The pre tax accounts also reduce payroll tax for the business.
For a company competing for hourly workers or skilled trades, a commuter benefit or a dependent care FSA can land better than a small raise. It costs the business less and it solves a problem the employee actually has.
8. Make workers' comp stop being an annual guess
Most businesses estimate payroll at the start of a workers' comp policy year, pay a premium built on that estimate, and settle up at audit. When the estimate is wrong you either float the carrier money for twelve months or you owe a large check you did not plan for.
Gusto offers pay as you go workers' compensation that pulls from actual payroll every cycle. Premium follows real wages instead of a forecast. Audit adjustments get much smaller.
This is cleaner accounting as well. The expense hits the same period as the wages rather than showing up later as a lump sum true up that distorts a month.
9. Find tax credits sitting in your payroll data
Gusto will scan your payroll data to see whether you qualify for research and development tax credits, then help you claim them. Most businesses never find out either way, because checking means digging through payroll records nobody wants to dig through.
Plenty of businesses qualify without thinking of themselves as doing research. Software development, process engineering, product formulation, and prototyping work often count. If you have developers or engineers on payroll it is worth a look.
The same engine handles 401(k) startup credits. A business starting a new plan can claim credits over the first few years that cover a real share of what the plan costs to run. Gusto prepares the forms so the credit actually gets claimed rather than forgotten.
10. Sign up for Gusto payroll from inside Xero
This one is new as of August 2026, so most people have not seen it yet.
Xero Payroll, powered by Gusto, runs payroll inside the Xero interface under a single login. Payroll posts directly to the Xero general ledger with no import step and no sync to keep an eye on. You can run payroll as often as you need. Tax gets calculated and filed at the federal, state, and local level. Employees are paid by direct deposit and can log in to handle their own information. W-2s, contractor payments, time off balances, and benefit deductions are all handled in the same place.
It is a different experience from the Gusto platform rather than the same product in a new window. For a sole proprietor or a very small team already working in Xero every day, having books and payroll behind one login is a real advantage.
A more mature business will likely still want the Gusto platform itself. Multi state payroll, project tracking, benefits administration, and the time tools all live there. If you want to stay on Gusto and still connect the two, the original Gusto and Xero integration is still available.
Where Gusto is not the right fit
Gusto is a software company first. That is the source of most of what makes it good. It is also the tradeoff.
If what you want is a person who knows your business, picks up the phone, and fixes the problem while you wait, a local payroll service provider will beat Gusto on that. Regional providers build around service. You get a name and a direct line. When something goes sideways in the middle of a payroll run, that matters more than a well designed interface.
Gusto's support is strong for a software company. It is still software company support. You will usually work through help articles and chat before you reach a person.
Be honest with yourself about which one you are buying. A business that wants to run payroll itself with good tools will be happy on Gusto. A business that wants payroll taken off its plate entirely is shopping for something else.
Getting set up right the first time
We run payroll for many of our customers on Gusto. We are in the platform every week, which is why we have opinions about it.
Nearly everything above is a setup decision. Setup decisions are cheap to make at the start and expensive to redo later. Departments and project mapping is the clearest example. Getting that structure right when you turn payroll on means your gross margin is readable from day one. Going back to rebuild it after two years of history means someone is recategorizing thousands of transactions.
That work sits at the center of how we handle outsourced accounting and accounting system implementations. Once payroll data is structured properly, your financials start answering questions instead of raising them. That is also where our CFO Support work becomes useful.
