Developer FAQs

GET Payroll Data

Do we have access to form data, such as the W2 info or 941s?

Specific forms and their fields are not available in the API. However, the payrolls endpoint provides everything Gusto uses in our form calculations and you can pull this data to then calculate the form information you may need – be sure to consider benefits and time periods that may impact total taxable wages.

Do you have webhooks we can subscribe to?

We currently do not have webhooks available but this is something we are working on building for partners to access in the future. You can make requests to the payrolls endpoint to capture any changes to a company’s payroll history and set up a regular cadence (rate limit is 60 req/s over a 60s sliding window but should be sufficient for this use case).

Every processed payroll will have a unique payroll ID and list pay_period, totals, etc. (GET /v1/companies/3337/payrolls?processed=true, you can specify date range too)

For a general ledger sync (accounting integrations), how can I fetch account categories?

Account categories align with specific payroll costs (i.e. regular wages, bonus, employer taxes, benefits). The accounts you match up with the categories should be pulled from your chart of accounts associated with your accounting platform. Once you align Gusto’s categories with your accounts, you will be able to construct an entry. Our Earning types endpoint will return all earnings types associated with the company.

Our Earning types endpoint will return all earnings types associated with the company.

For a general ledger sync (accounting integrations), what needs to be debited and what needs to be credited as a Journal entry?

Generally speaking, debits include expense items such as wages, taxes, employer contributions, bonus, commissions, reimbursements. Credits are when Gusto pulls cash or cash will be pulled at a later date (liability). We have an accounting guide to payroll totals available here.

How can I see an employee’s post-tax deductions? Which deductions does Gusto debit and pay for?

You can GET all post-tax deductions for an employee by pinging the garnishments endpoint. If “court_ordered”: true this will indicate that the deduction is a garnishment as opposed to a custom post-tax deduction. Gusto only debits and pays the child support garnishment on behalf of the employer. All other garnishments and deductions must be managed by the employer.

How do I set up a child-support garnishment in my Gusto demo account?

At this time we do not support child support garnishments in the demo environment since they require a valid Agency and CSE Case Number to set up. You will receive the following error message when attempting to set this up in demo: “Oh no! Something went wrong.”

How do I GET gross wage totals for paid time off (PTO)?

Our payroll endpoint will return a breakdown of PTO hours (vacation or sick) by employee for each payroll but not the total gross wages for total PTO in a given time period. However, this can be calculated using the number of hours returned for each time off type and the employees hourly rate. Our payrolls endpoint returns all the raw payroll data, you just may need to set up some custom calculations on your end to get the data in the exact format you need.

How do I retrieve off-cycle and/or bonus payrolls?

The request GET /v1/companies/3337/payrolls?include_off_cycle=true should return all off-cycle payrolls, including bonus payrolls.

What debits can I expect to see via the API?

There are 4 types of payroll debits that may occur from Gusto. The two most common are 1) net pay and 2) employee and employer taxes. Reimbursements will be a third, separate debit. The fourth type of payroll debit is for child support garnishments, if applicable. Gusto will debit and pay the child support deduction on behalf of the employer which is why this shows up as a separate line item in the response from the payroll endpoint (Note: Gusto does not debit for other post-tax deductions or garnishments, these will remain in the company bank account and the company will be responsible for making this payment).

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