Gusto Connection

Connecting OwnFold to Gusto

If your co-op pays people through Gusto, OwnFold can connect to your Gusto company. Your team keeps logging hours in OwnFold Timesheets; approved hours go to Gusto for payroll, and each payroll you run in Gusto comes back to OwnFold and is booked in your ledger. Open it from Payroll, then Gusto. Finance staff and administrators run the connection; auditors can see it but not change it.

1. What the connection does, and what it doesn’t

• Does: sends approved timesheet hours to Gusto as time sheets, one per shift, and books the payrolls and contractor payments you run in Gusto: gross wages, employee and employer taxes, other deductions, buy-in deductions and net pay, person by person.
• Doesn’t: run payroll. Gusto doesn’t let other apps submit payroll, so you still review and run each payroll in Gusto, as you do today. OwnFold doesn’t store bank details or Social Security numbers from Gusto.

2. Connecting

1. On the Gusto page, click Connect Gusto. You go to Gusto’s sign-in page.
2. Sign in as a primary or full-access admin of your Gusto company, pick the company if you manage more than one, and approve OwnFold.
3. Gusto sends you back to OwnFold, which shows the connected company, who connected it and when. The sign-in link works once, for 10 minutes, and only for the person who started it; if it expires, click Connect Gusto again.

One Gusto company connects to one OwnFold workspace, so hours never reach the same payroll twice. Connecting also sets your co-op’s payroll provider to Gusto.

3. Matching workers

The Workers table lists your members next to the employees and contractors in Gusto. OwnFold suggests a match when a member’s email matches the Gusto record’s personal or work email, or, failing that, when the names match exactly. Click Match suggestions to accept them all, or choose a person for each member by hand. Unmatch removes a match. A Gusto person can be matched to only one member. Each match is saved on the member’s worker record in People & HR and recorded in the audit log.

Hours for members who aren’t matched aren’t sent, and the send report names them. Employees also need a job in Gusto, because Gusto files hours against a job.

4. Sending approved hours

• Click Send approved hours. OwnFold finds Gusto’s current pay period (reaching back to an earlier period whose payroll hasn’t run yet, or forward to the next one if none has started) and sends every approved timesheet entry in it that hasn’t been sent.
• Each entry goes as one shift with its clock-in and clock-out times in your co-op’s time zone, split into regular and overtime hours. Contractors’ hours all go as regular hours. Entries logged without clock times are placed from 9:00 that day.
• The report shows how many shifts were sent, how many were sent before, and who was skipped and why. Sent entries are marked, so pressing the button again never sends anything twice. If Gusto is still processing when OwnFold stops waiting, press it again in a minute to confirm.
• Then, in Gusto, use Sync hours to payroll (or Sync hours from connected time tracking apps while running payroll) and run payroll as usual.

Hours sent after a payroll has run go to Gusto too; your Gusto admin pays them with an off-cycle payroll. Correct a mistake in a sent shift in Gusto as well as in OwnFold.

5. Bringing payrolls in

• Every day OwnFold checks Gusto for payrolls processed since the last check and books them. Click Bring in payrolls to do it straight away, or choose a start date to bring in earlier payrolls. The first check starts from the day you connected.
• Each payroll is booked once, dated its check date: the wages your approved timesheets accrued are settled, and the timesheets for the period are marked paid. A payroll already in your books is skipped, so bringing payrolls in again is always safe.
• A deduction whose name matches the buy-in deduction name in your payroll settings is credited to the member’s capital account as buy-in. Other deductions (benefits, retirement, garnishments) are booked as withholdings.
• Contractor payments made in Gusto are booked too, each as its own payment.
• If a payroll can’t be booked (for example, it falls in a closed period), the report says why and the next check tries again.

6. Disconnecting

Click Disconnect and confirm. OwnFold revokes its access in Gusto, deletes its stored Gusto credentials and stops sending hours and bringing in payrolls. Payrolls already booked stay in your books, and worker matches are kept in case you connect again. If you want Gusto’s own time tracking back, turn it on in Gusto. If Gusto can’t confirm the revoke, remove OwnFold from the connected apps in your Gusto account as well.

OwnFold stores Gusto’s access tokens encrypted and never shows them to anyone, and they are never part of a workspace export. When a closed workspace’s data is deleted, OwnFold revokes its Gusto access first.