ZipBooks has made Gusto its preferred partner solution for payroll. ZipBooks provides a simple but powerful accounting solution for small businesses. This is not just an announcement without weight. ZipBooks also has a marketing offer and technology integration to support it. However, the announcement seems a repeat of that from four months ago when ZipBooks announced that it had partnered with Gusto in another blog. All that changes is that Gusto is now a preferred partner for ZipBooks. However, there is little indication that much else has changed.
Correction
While ZipBooks did announce the partnership with Gusto four months ago this announcement includes the additional integration and extended offer. ZipBooks updated the previous blogs to fall in line with the current situation, which led to the misunderstanding. The integration was launched on 29th July 2019. Accounting to a spokesperson at ZipBooks there is also a phase 3 that will see even deeper integration between the two products.
Joint Marketing
ZipBooks and Gusto are giving a three month free trial for users of both products. This compares with the one month for new Gusto users. Pricing is then the Gusto standard of $45/month. This is presumably based on the base price of $39 plus $6 per person per month. This is for the Core Gusto solution. More functionality, such as PTO policies, time off requests & employee offers and onboarding are included in Gusto Complete. Pricing is $39/month for base and $12/person per month for that product.
Technology integration
Importantly, ZipBooks also supports a bidirectional integration to Gusto. The integration supports both a manual and scheduled data transfer for time entries. This reduces the duplication and prevents errors with payroll data recorded in the books for small businesses automatically. When payroll is run, the transactions are posted into ZipBooks. Users on higher level ZipBooks plans can enjoy a greater visibility of detail.
Enterprise Times: What does this mean
This is a significant step for ZipBooks. Although it does beg the question about the relationships with the other payroll solutions it integrates to. These include Sure Payroll, Inova Payroll and Square Payroll. It perhaps demonstrates the growing grip that Gusto has on the MSME payroll market. However, there is no parallel announcement from Gusto about the ZipBooks statement, unlike for Xero, when it announced Gusto as a preferred partner last year. Although Gusto does indicate that there are 40 joint clients currently and that it has been a partner since 2016.
