Master Gusto: Step-by-Step Guide to Add Your Company
Mar 08, 2025
Running an assisted living facility is rewarding, but managing payroll can feel like a challenge. That’s why choosing the right payroll solution is essential. Gusto makes managing payroll simple and effective, especially for small businesses like assisted living facilities.
In this guide, we’ll walk you through how to set up your company with Gusto step by step. By the end, you’ll have a streamlined system that keeps your team happy and frees up your time to focus on caring for your residents.
Check out the video too:
Why Gusto Is Perfect for Assisted Living Payroll
Gusto is an all-in-one payroll and HR solution designed for small and mid-sized businesses. It’s simple to use and handles everything from onboarding employees to filing payroll taxes. Here’s why Gusto works so well for assisted living:
- Easy Onboarding: Quickly set up employees (W-2) and contractors (1099).
- Tax Compliance: Automatically files federal, state, and local taxes.
- Custom Payroll Schedules: Set pay periods that work for your team.
- Health Benefits Integration: Offer health insurance directly through Gusto if needed.
With Gusto, you can handle payroll smoothly, letting you spend more time focusing on your residents and team.
Step 1: Sign Up with Gusto
- Go to Gusto’s Website: Visit Gusto and click “Get Started.”
- Answer a Few Questions: Indicate whether you’re new to payroll or switching from another provider.
- Provide Basic Business Info: Share your business name and select your industry (e.g., “Assisted Living Facilities for the Elderly”).
Step 2: Set Up Your Business Profile
Gusto will guide you through creating a detailed profile for your business. Be ready to input:
- Entity Type: Is your business an LLC, sole proprietorship, or corporation?
- Industry Code: Use the appropriate NAICS code for assisted living facilities.
- Number of Employees: Specify how many team members you have, including W-2 employees and 1099 contractors.
Step 3: Add Tax and Banking Information
For payroll to work, Gusto needs your tax and banking details:
- EIN (Employer Identification Number): Required for payroll taxes.
- State Tax IDs: Ensure you’re registered with your state for unemployment and income tax.
- Bank Account Info: Gusto securely verifies your account for direct deposits.
Step 4: Set Your Payroll Schedule
Customize your payroll to meet your facility’s needs:
- Choose weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly pay periods.
- Align paydays with your cash flow.
- Consider bi-weekly payroll for staff like caregivers and nurses who work shifts.
Step 5: Add Employees and Contractors
Input the details for each employee or contractor:
- Personal Info: Name, address, and Social Security Number.
- Classification: W-2 for full-time/part-time staff or 1099 for contractors.
- Pay Details: Include hourly wages or salaries.
Pro Tip: Double-check classification to avoid compliance issues, especially when hiring nurses or caregivers.
Step 6: Review and Finalize Setup
Gusto provides a checklist to ensure everything is ready:
- Review payroll schedules and tax info.
- Electronically sign required documents.
- Explore optional benefits like health insurance or workers' comp.
Choosing the Right Gusto Plan
Gusto offers three plans:
- Core: Covers the basics like payroll and tax filing.
- Complete: Adds HR tools and advanced onboarding features.
- Concierge: Premium plan with HR support for larger teams.
For most assisted living facilities, the Complete plan offers the best balance of features and value.
Why Payroll Efficiency Matters
Efficient payroll isn’t just about paying your staff on time—it’s about reducing stress and staying compliant. With Gusto, you can simplify payroll, build trust with your employees, and spend more time on what matters most: creating a safe, caring environment for your residents.
Final Thoughts
Setting up Gusto is quick, easy, and a game-changer for assisted living businesses. From managing schedules to ensuring tax compliance, this platform takes the headache out of payroll. Ready to make the switch? Get started with Gusto today and focus on growing your business while caring for your residents.
Your Next Step
Download our Business Plan Checklist to ensure you have everything you need to write a solid business plan.
Need help figuring out where to start? Join the next Roadmap Challenge and build your launch plan with me.
Show full transcript 👇
Transcript
00:00:00
finding the right payroll vendor can be a pretty stressful situation you've gotta you're gonna be working with this company um at least on an on a bi-weekly basis um for the foreseeable future you're gonna be logging in and putting in new employees you're gonna be running payroll it's it's a big decision who you're going to be working with you want to make sure that you have the right person the right application the right software for you and your business in today's video i'm going to get into the
00:00:28
company that i use gusto and how how they how you set up an account with them and how you get things the ball rolling so that you can start using gusto to run payroll for your assisted living facility or for your small business hi everybody i'm brandon gustafson i own and operate two assisted living facilities and i created this channel to help people just like you learn the ins and outs of investing in assisted living welcome to assisted living investing [Music] hey everybody welcome back to the
00:01:07
channel in our last video we talked about different payroll vendor options that you want to be aware of and who you can use so that you can meet the needs that you have for your facility in today's video i'm going to get into a tutorial of how you can set up an account with gusto who i use for my payroll they're the payroll vendor that i use we love them we're really happy with them i'm going to put a link down below in the bio where you can go and sign up for a free trial with
00:01:35
them and if you do it you'll get a free you'll get a gift card a visa gift card from gusto for signing up for their services i'll also get one so full disclosure on that but regardless of the the gift card i highly recommend them i think they're a great company i wouldn't recommend them if it was something i didn't believe in so make sure you use that link and give them a try and i'll get into the tutorial now and show you kind of how you can get things set up um for gusto for you as you're getting
00:02:05
things in place all right welcome to the tutorial for getting things set up and gus i'm going to apologize again my platform that my computer's on while i do my recording is a little unstable so you're probably going to see me wobble a little bit but the screen should be fine so you should be good there so what you want to do initially is go into an internet browser and you're just going to type in gusto.com um and then you are going to if you use that link that i give you below it's going to take you right to us
00:02:31
so go ahead and do that but you are you're going to need a new provider so you're going to click on this and it's going to take you into the process where you're going to get started and from here it's going to ask you a few different questions so have you run payroll yet in this calendar year and i'm going to set this up as if i'm just a brand new business and everything like that but you want to answer the questions according to what you are running so no how do you currently run payroll
00:03:02
we're new to running payroll or we use another online service or we just do it ourselves manually so let's see i'm new to it i work in an office is what i'm going to put here that's probably fine i mean you could maybe put this one i don't think it's going to matter at this point in the process what type of employees are you dealing with are they w2s 1099s are they both so 1099 is like a contractor that would be doing work for you so if you were using a 1099 nurse a nurse wanted to work for you as a 1099
00:03:37
then this is how you would you would put in both i'm just going to put in w-2s and then are you interested in offering like health benefits or other benefits gusto allows you to do this for your team and i'm just going to put in no for now and it's going to take me to this spot right here and it's going to have me enter in my contact information to get things set up to get started um into my process so so once you have logged in you're going to get a screen that's like this and you're
00:04:06
just going to put in you know your information here so i'm going to do test and w-2 employees just answering a lot of the same questions again honestly is what it ends up being how many employees you're going to have i don't know five and it doesn't need to be exact as this is kind of like an estimate it's not going to make or break you by doing this your entity type so i'm going to link that up above the different types of entities and the structures there so we're an llc
00:04:32
the industry code so you if you start typing in assisted living you're going to get a few different things in here i think we actually did assisted living facilities for the elderly for both of ours and there is a specific code and you can see here they ask you this to help you stay compliant with any of the finance regulations that might be applicable to your industry so you just want to make sure that you're putting in the correct code there but it will add it in right here and if you if
00:05:01
you're like if you're not an assistant living facility and you're working on something else and you're working on setting up gusto and your industry is not in there you would just type click this in here and then um you know what is your industry um say dog grooming grooming i'm pretty sure um dog grooming would be up here um but you know let's just say that it's not so yeah it's not how about that um that was just a test um so you would just put it in there and you could type it in we
00:05:28
though are doing assisted living right so um we're gonna do that it's gonna say boom and then if i wanna uh read more about it i can click that link so that's great we are not going to offer health benefits um how does company currently run payroll and we're going to say we're new to payroll but if it's you know something like here where you have one that's there and i've used adp i'm gonna put it in there and then i'm gonna click on add company and it's
00:05:55
gonna take me to the next screen okay so from here um it's gonna have you tell things about the team so what is your who are you planning to pay so you could and this is all that applies so myself w2 employees um or we're not planning to pay anybody for a few months we're going to submit that when is my first payroll run let's just say it's going to be on this date has have we run any payroll yet in 2022 nope um and that whoa that's cool great that simplifies the experience i mentioned
00:06:25
this in the last video if you've already done it um then there you would just click yes like if you are already using a different payroll vendor and you want to use gusto now you just hit yes and they'll say okay yeah we need to get some more information from you and they'll do the things give you the information that you need to pass along to them otherwise you know grade simplifies the process we're going to submit we've got five employees how do they need to track their time if
00:06:50
you want them to track their time then hit yes it's going to give you some different options on here i'm just going to put no because a lot of my stuff is shift work they work eight hours if somebody's there they're probably working an eight hour shift the state that we're in we'll just click on alaska just because it's the top one but you just put the state that you need and then who am i i'm the owner co-owner or ceo and so that's where i'm going to put it
00:07:15
in there i could do if i'm you know a bookkeeper accountant doing things they could also set this up for you so i'm going to go ahead and click submit on that and then right here again it's going to ask me i don't know why it does this it feels like it asks you repetitive questions and i'm not sure why but i'm just going to type in assistive living again right here it has my entity type there and then from there i'm going to go ahead and click submit and then it's going to take
00:07:43
me to the next step all right so from here after you've clicked that submit button it's going to take you to this kind of um checklist thing that that you want to look at right so from here you're going to be given this checklist of the different things that you need to do so that you can get everything completely set up and added in here and so i'm going to need to add my company address and so i'm going to click in here and i'm going to type it in confirm my company locations
00:08:09
if i've got an accountant that i want to do this is like adding their email explore benefits do i want to offer benefits at employees so if i know who the employees that i'm adding i'm going to throw them in here if you are an owner i'll point this out if you're an owner and you're not paying yourself out of this because you're not running payroll for yourself and you're just going to do draws on it do not add yourself to gusto it'll keep asking you for tax information and stuff like that so just
00:08:36
don't do it and avoid it and you'll you'll be better off that way if there are any contractors you want to put it in there and you can click skip this step and like if i do that you'll see on there it's going to mark it done for me so federal tax information a lot of this information we've talked about this in previous videos around like setting up a bank account or things like that it's going to ask you a lot of the same information so you're going to need you know your articles of organization
00:09:00
your ein letter all those types of things state tax info so you're going to need to make sure that everything is in there so that you can do things with the state some of the states are going to need some kind of a business license registered with the secretary of state or different things like that your bank account information your pay schedule so how quickly you know how frequently are you going to be um paying people so are you going to do it weekly bi-weekly um twice a month like how are you going to do it when do you
00:09:30
want pay payroll to be run those types of things so you can get in there and and kind of start putting things in place so you would say yep my first pay date is actually going to be this day um we are going to do so you can adjust a few of these things i want the last you can look at this and figure out what it is and this will kind of give you a few of the um different options up here and you can edit the payroll schedule and say you know i want it to be every week i want it twice a month monthly
00:10:00
quarterly annually whatever that number is going to look like and you can kind of filter those things in here so yeah and just kind of build it out and edit it specific to yours or they will give you kind of suggestions on there on how you want to do it sign your documents so you're just gonna do some e-signatures on some of these things you're going to verify your bank account so they will you'll log into like your bank account through their system and it will verify things for you or also do the manual
00:10:31
thing where they do some micro transactions that come out to you on that workers comp if you don't already have it they can help you get that set up but you need to make sure that you have that in place any r d tax credits that you have so i don't think that's applicable to what you're doing in assisted living but it's something you want to kind of look at and then discover apps so there are third-party applications that can get into it so it talked about a little bit earlier time tracking and things like
00:10:58
that you could use a third-party application to do your time tracking for example and then the last one is to choose your plan and you don't have to necessarily go in order that it's going through here in this checklist you could go out of turn and that's totally fine this is just a checklist for you to get things done but for right here we'll look at the different plans that they have for gusto it's going to ask you a couple of questions so let's say um you know i'm interested in workforce
00:11:24
management and and that's that's probably about it i don't need anything else i'm going to hit continue i don't need any hr features there and then it's going to come over here and say here's your different plans so it's going to recommend you do complete recommend complete four tests um let's see business so businesses like mine are choosing the complete plan um so it's saying these are all of the options all the features that you get with it this is your base
00:11:57
price 39 dollars per month this is 12 dollars per month per person but i want to look at the other plans and see what they have gusto has three plans as of the recording of this video in january 2022 there's a core plan a complete plan and a concierge plan so you can kind of look at these and say oh what's the difference between complete and poor what's on there so this is next day deposit and two-day deposit i can do let's see health benefits workers comp employees uh customizable employee onboarding and
00:12:27
standard on boarding tasks team management looks like there's a big thing in there around it and some of these project and tool time so i could say oh you know what i think really what i need is just this one right here so i'm going to select that one you can choose your deposit schedule if you do the complete plan it lets you do this next day deposit otherwise you're going to be doing one of these other ones and you're going to say save and continue and um it will mark it down right there
00:12:53
so there you go and if you are like uh if you're in the middle of something even after you set up your plan you go into your settings and review and change plan and you can adjust your plan services there so that's kind of the the tutorial of how you're getting things done here you'll see right here it's it's tracking how i'm how i'm doing and getting things everything set up and ready to go for the plan which is very helpful and useful as you're getting things up and
00:13:20
and running so uh really useful tool and the and so yeah that's the the tutorial for how to get in here how to set up a an account um for yourself and gusto and get a company up and running so that you can start running payroll which is what you need to do as a as a business so i hope that was a helpful tutorial make sure you smash that like button if you found this information useful and found it helpful to kind of walk through that process step by step so you know exactly what you're doing as you get things set
00:13:48
up in gusto make sure you use that referral link down below so that you can get gusto on a free trial and also get that visa gift card sent out to you for for using the service in my next video i'm going to get into doing a full tutorial on how to run payroll industry kind of show you the process of what that's like and what the interface is like once you set everything up and you have everything everything in place so watch that video as well and i'll reference that up above and to
00:14:16
learn more about investing in assisted living make sure you visit me on assistedlivinginvesting.net i've got other content over on the website free resources you can set up a call with me as well and make sure you follow me on my other social media platforms and remember it doesn't take a lot just a little bit just keep making progress step by step by step if you do it and you're consistent and diligent i promise you that you will be successful thanks for watching and have a great day
00:14:41
[Music] you
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