Every day, Gusto helps more than half a million small businesses pay their teams, stay compliant, and offer benefits. That gives us a front-row seat to what business owners are up against: serving customers, managing finances, keeping up with compliance, competing for talent, and now making sense of AI, often all at once.
Our goal is to make the hard things easier, starting on day one. Today at Gusto’s Fall Showcase, we’re announcing new products and features to support small businesses at every stage.
Start a business: help from day one
Starting a business has typically meant figuring it out alone: which entity to form, where to bank, how to keep track of the money. Every one of those steps is a place where a good idea can stall.
Gusto changes that. Business owners can now form an LLC, open a business bank account,1 and see where their money stands, all in one place, before they hire anyone. And because it all lives in the same place they’ll later hire, pay, and grow, there’s no need to start over down the road. Both launches are in limited Beta testing currently, and will be open to everyone soon!
Our bet is simple: if it’s easier to get started, more people will, and more of them will succeed.
Run a business faster with less risk and busywork
Growth for a small business means more behind-the-scenes work. Our new features help business owners stay compliant, automate payroll and contractor payments, and put AI to work on the tasks that eat up their week.
Solving paperwork and preventing problems
Gusto Business Compliance helps small businesses stay on top of the obligations that trip them up, especially when they hire in a new state. These include state tax registration, annual report filing, and government mail monitoring.
Payroll that keeps up with how business owners actually work
Multi-location payroll runs one payroll for hourly employees who work across state or city lines, applying the right taxes for each supported location.
Intelligent automations gather hours, flag anything unusual, and turn payroll into a quick review and sign-off.
More control over pay with same-day pay for eligible teams, off-cycle bonuses and corrections, custom semi-monthly schedules, and printed, mailed paychecks with delivery tracking.
Contractors and projects in one place, for easier tracking
Contractor tools let business owners hire and pay U.S. and international contractors in supported countries on one platform. With invoice ingestion, Gusto reads an uploaded invoice and prefills the paysheet for review and approval.
Project tracking lets business owners tag hours to projects, clients, and tasks and see the true labor cost of every job.
Gusto, wherever small businesses work
Business owners can now connect Gusto to Claude, ChatGPT, and other AI tools. They can ask questions about payroll and teams, prep payroll, and generate reports, and they approve every change before it’s final.
Developers and power users can also connect through Gusto’s MCP server or install the Gusto CLI in one command. Before each payroll, an agent can prepare what it can and send a prioritized list of decisions that need the business owner’s approval.
Business owners didn’t start their businesses to become payroll and compliance experts. Yet getting payroll and compliance wrong can lead to fines, penalties or even business failure. Gusto knows what needs to be done and helps handle it for business owners proactively, so they can get back to growing their businesses.
Grow and invest in the team: Offer the benefits, guidance, and people tools that help a team thrive
Great benefits help business owners hire and keep great people, but most don’t have an HR department to lean on. We’re making benefits simpler inside Gusto.
Gus, our AI assistant, now gives personalized, real-time guidance on benefits and builds a ready-to-submit package covering medical, dental, vision, and more. A licensed advisor reviews the package before anything is finalized.
Gusto 401(k), built into Gusto helps business owners manage retirement plans in the Benefits tab on Gusto — no new logins, no switching platforms.
Health Reimbursement Arrangements (HRAs) give employees the flexibility to choose health coverage that works for them, while employers set a monthly allowance and control what they spend. Employers can seamlessly manage reimbursements alongside payroll in Gusto.
Voluntary Life & Disability benefits provide employee-paid coverage added through automatic payroll deductions, at no additional direct cost to the business.
Our guided benefits renewal gives small business options to help control costs, side-by-side comparisons, and direct access to a licensed benefits advisor at renewal time.
Many business owners want expert HR support, but aren’t ready to hire a full HR team. We’re putting more HR expertise directly at their fingertips on the Gusto platform.
New HR resources within Gusto include building an employee handbook in Gusto and generating documents like performance improvement plans and termination letters. Business owners can also get proactive alerts when employment laws change, written answers from a human HR expert, and instant answers from Gus, our AI assistant.
Gusto HR Partners gives you access to an experienced, fractional HR professional without the cost of a full-time hire.
Gusto Professional Employer Organization (PEO) helps take on much of the day-to-day HR, payroll, benefits, and compliance work for small business owners.
We’re tapping into the power and scale of the many small businesses that we serve on the Gusto platform. This enables us to give our small business customers more access to support for benefits and HR, which might have been otherwise impossible for them to reach.
New purpose-built programs and tools for accountants
Today, more than two-thirds of our small business customers have the support of an accountant. That’s not something we take lightly – our accountant partners play a vital role in how we support the small business economy. That’s why we’ve launched:
A rebuilt Gusto Pro, our platform built for accountants, which includes AI-assisted workflows for automating core payroll tasks, automated reporting, new connectors to Gmail and Outlook, and Pro Gus, an AI assistant providing multi-client visibility.
A Multi-Client MCP that lets firms work across selected clients in a single AI conversation.
An expanded Gusto Partner Program with new Marketing and Partner Development Funds.
Gusto Solo Advisory Tools, helping firms advise solopreneur clients with calculators for S-corp election and reasonable compensation.
We work with more than 23,000 accounting firms to support our mutual customers, small businesses. Their success is our success.
Support for the entire small business journey
Small business owners wear every hat, and they shouldn’t have to carry every burden too. Whether someone is forming an LLC, running payroll across state lines, or building a benefits package for their first team, our goal is the same: take the hard parts off their plate so they can focus on what they started their business to do.
That’s the work behind everything we announced today. Explore everything we announced at Gusto’s Fall Showcase, and tell us what you’d like us to build next.
1 Gusto is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services provided by Increase Bank, Member FDIC.
