hey it's patti scharf CPA and co-founder of catching clouds the leader in
e-commerce accounting today I want to talk about the big announcement that
Xero made last week this is really huge you may not realize how huge this is but
it is big Xero made the announcement that they are ditching their Xero
payroll in favor of integrating Gusto's payroll in with their system now if you
haven't been using any payroll with Xero you probably don't care but this is a
huge deal so we started using Xero in 2012 we started using gustó which at the
time was called zenpayroll back in 2014 and at the time Zen payroll wasn't quite
in all 50 states yet but they were getting close and Xero bought Montilla
or something like that which is a payroll service and their intention was
to get to all 50 states it is now 2018 and I don't think that Xero payroll yet
was in all 50 states because big surprise it's really hard
payroll is really hard every state does everything differently it's really kind
of a colossal pain but gusto got into all 50 states by I want to say early
2015 so we they were almost there when we started using them we founded on them
about the last I don't know couple dozen or something and they got there really
actually pretty quickly so we're really happy with them but the thing is with
Xero and gusto working together and it has always been this way from day one it
has always worked seamlessly it's always been just a beautiful pairing and I
always wondered and I always ask the people at zero why didn't you just buy
gusto or at least just integrate with them because it's such a no-brainer you
talked to any of the accountants any of the big players in the industry who are
using Xero in the US and I would bet almost all of them are already using
gusto with for their payroll instead of Xero payroll and the reason is and
my opinion is that zero payroll is more of a do-it-yourself system and it's
completely contrary to the whole ideology of zero zero one of the big
things that I like about them is that they understand that the relationship
between the accountant and and the business owner is really critical to the
success of a small business so if you try and add in features and things so it
becomes a do-it-yourself product you aren't really you're doing a disservice
to the small businesses okay so so let me tell you if you're not familiar with
gusto some of the benefits of gusto besides
being in all 50 states besides being really cleanly integrated with zero
already and it sounds like they're going to do an even deeper integration which
is great I'm happy to see that and I'm curious to see what that looks like but
in addition to those things gussto also offers small businesses some HR
functionality they can be your broker force for health insurance and dental
insurance vision life they also have a paid time off system in the system if
it's not robust enough for you you can use t sheets that integrates with gusto
which integrates with zero gusto also uses a system called guideline to offer
retirement benefits so we have like a 401k in a Roth 401k and guide line just
takes care of all of the you know the 5500 and all the other paperwork and it
you know the onboarding and everything of our employees who want to use that
retirement plan so it's really great the way gussto has all these other benefits
for a small business beyond just processing of payrolls so as the
business grows they can offer more and more benefits and Gaston can take care
of all of that for you something that gussto just recently announced is they
have the ability to if you have employees who are living paycheck to
paycheck and they need an advance on their paycheck they will actually they
have a system where you can give your employees in advance
and it comes out of their next paycheck it's really it sounds like a great idea
for those small businesses who really need that functionality one of the other
things I really love about gusto is it has a whole self onboarding system so so
if you hire a new person you can send them a letter that says hey here's your
offer letter thanks for joining our team we're so happy to have you and then they
just enter in all the information for their w-4s their I 9s all the
information that's necessary for them to be paid through payroll it comes back to
the accountant who looks at it says yes I have everything that I need and done
but there's not so much back and forth no you gave me the wrong thing and
they're like like it's great to have that self onboarding feature one thing
that I heard somebody else complain about in a YouTube video is this four
day lead time like you have to process payroll on Monday so that they get paid
so your employees get paid on Friday but just be aware that you can contact
guests oh and they'll run like a credit check on them and they can bump that up
to two days so you process your payroll on Wednesday and your employees get paid
on Friday and I think one of the things that I love best about guusto is they
really feel like a partner like I've worked with some other full-service
payroll systems in the past and like if you have a notice or something you send
it to them and they just go I don't know account me like that it's not my problem
we don't do notices here but Xero will actually they'll take care of it for you
if they can if they can't they will come back to you and say here's exactly what
has to happen boom boom boom boom boom so in that way they really feel like
like a partner in the process so I guess in summary I just want to say I think
this is a great thing one of the things that I'm really impressed by is that I
know that zero has invested so much time and energy and money into making their
payroll system work and it really gives me a a sense of joy
that zero is able to take a step back though you know we went down the wrong
path but you know better late than never let's just cut our losses and do what we
should have done at the beginning and and get together with with gusto and
kudos to you I think that takes a lot of courage and I wish both of you all the
success if you don't share my opinion that is okay I'm curious to hear your
perspective if you have additional comments please leave them down below in
the comments and I guess that's it I hope you like this video if you did
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I'll catch you later