Gusto, a provider of payroll and human resources services, debuted three new services — Gusto Academy, People Analytics and Gusto Connect — at its Gusto Next conference Wednesday in Denver and unveiled the findings of a new report on the services needed by small businesses from their accountants.
The new services for accountants to offer to their small business clients come in conjunction with the findings of the report. The
In a tight labor market, business owners indicated they need more guidance from their accountants on how to retain their employees, with 69% of owners saying they have taken steps to improve pay or benefits in the past year, mainly to retain or attract staff. They have seen the positive impact on employee satisfaction and productivity and are looking for the next steps to take: 52% of business owners are seeking advice on developing an affordable benefits package, but only 10% currently receive that advice from their accountant. This gap represents an opportunity for accountants to provide businesses with advice on people in addition to the financial guidance they already provide.
During an economic downturn, owners also need help locating extra funding and sources of revenue, with 69% of business owners saying they're not fully confident in their ability to navigate an economic downturn, offering space for accountants to provide such guidance. In addition, 36% of the business owners polled said that, during a downturn, they need advice on finding additional money in the form of tax credits, an area accountants know well. According to the poll, 62% of business owners said they were not aware of the research and development tax credit, for example.
Accountants may be leaving money on the table by not offering these services and risk losing a competitive edge, according to the report. Business owners are willing to pay more than they already pay their accountant — sometimes 10% to 20% more — for financial and people advisory services. In addition, 44% of owners said they would pay more for people advisory, and nearly half of business owners said they would consider switching to an accountant that provides proactive advice on people operations and workforce practices. The new offerings from Gusto aim to provide more such services for accounting business clients.
The new Gusto Academy offers accountants education, knowledge and skills to provide people advisory services. The academy training includes both payroll essentials along with payroll advisory skills so accountants can offer their business clients strategic recommendations based on data on headcount changes, cost of labor and revenue per employee.
The new People Analytics tools provide actionable data on clients' businesses to drive powerful, people-focused recommendations. The tools include key client people metrics, such as team growth rate, total payroll cost and more, based on nationwide payroll data from Gusto's network of businesses and employees. The information includes compensation benchmarking for roles based on industry, experience, and location, along with financial insights on key client business metrics via an integration with QuickBooks Online, with others soon to come.
Gusto Connect is a new online community to bring accountants together so they can share their lessons learned, insights and best practices with their peers.
"Gusto Academy is a major breakthrough in professional development for the accounting profession, with modern education in everything from payroll essentials to people advisory," said Jaclyn Anku, head of accountant community and education at Gusto. "People Analytics is this incredible tool within Gusto Pro that allows accountants to easily access data through this marriage of people and financial data, compensation benchmarking and insights on payroll and people. It arms them with the data and insights they need to deliver the services that they learned within the academy. And Gusto Connect is the new home for communities, for peer support, for knowledge sharing, for crowdsourcing and crowd sharing."
The new services can help accountants aid small business clients deal with the disruptions seen in recent years from the pandemic.
"We've seen decades worth of changes happening across the economy within just the past two years," said Gusto economist Luke Pardue. "Thinking about where we were in February 2020, there were 7 million job openings, about one for every unemployed person, and now there are 11.2 million job openings just last month. That amounts to two job openings for every unemployed person who is looking for work. We've seen this incredible escalation and sustaining of a really tight labor market. On the other face of it, we've seen on Gusto's platform that 60% of our businesses have at least one employee who lives at least 100 miles away from the business location, and the rise of remote work has been another level shift that is here to stay. Ultimately, all these disruptions have brought a lot of opportunities for businesses, but there are also a lot of challenges in negotiating this new economic landscape, particularly as small and medium size business owners look at their people management. There are a lot of new opportunities for sourcing talent for remote work, but also challenges, like determining competitive compensation in a distributed workforce, ensuring payroll compliance when employees are crossing state lines, and also in a hybrid and remote world maintaining a cohesive and positive company culture has been really challenging."
For more information on the new services, see this
Separately, Ignition, a client engagement and commerce system for the professional services industry, unveiled
