View and download reports

Report name	Description	Additional information
Payroll Journal	This report shows detailed payroll information for each pay period and employee—perfect for accountants.	Customizable. Filter by: Date range Year Employee State Job Earnings Taxes Multiple pay rates Job codes And more Select and/or deselect any and all custom options. Often used for workers' comp audits. Earning totals for the time period found at the base of the report. One-time reimbursement totals are a lump sum (rather than individualized or grouped by name). Recurring reimbursements will be grouped by name. This report can be emailed if you have more than 100 employees at the company. This report may not be available if your company has greater than 500 employees and contractors (active or dismissed).
Benefits Report	This report shows employee deduction amounts and company contribution amounts for each benefit.	Based on year-to-date totals. Date range is always a standard calendar year. This report can be emailed if you have more than 50 employees.
Employee benefit elections*	This report shows a list of employees, their dependents, their benefits information, and salary.	*A tool for non-Gusto brokers or company employees in charge of managing benefits to audit coverage information with carriers or for quoting purposes. Provides a “point in time” summary of benefit information as of the chosen report date. Only available to admins with both Manage all benefits and View payroll reports and tax filing permissions, or admins with full access.
Agency Payments	This report shows all federal, state, and local tax deposits as well as any garnishment payments Gusto has made on behalf of your company.	Report will not show any in-flight payments, only those that have officially been processed. Example: For Q1 (Jan 1 - March 31), taxes are due on April 30. Q1 taxes may not appear in this report until close to that final due date.
Bank Transactions	This report shows all payroll-related bank transactions between Gusto and your company's bank account. You can also try the General Ledger report (more info below)	Report is ordered by oldest transaction date, since you've been with Gusto, to the most recent one. Cannot be downloaded as a CSV. Contains every debit and credit initiated by Gusto. Click 'view details' on any debit transaction to get a more granular breakdown.
General Ledger (beta)	View journal entries with debit and credit information.	Download by check date Split journal lines by certain segments: No split Job  Department Can include accounting codes if you have accounting integrations. Ledger includes: Account type Account description Debits Credits Both "basic" and "detailed" info—toggle tabs in the export. Not supported at this time: Custom dates range ledgers or ledgers for multiple payrolls at once. Ledgers by pay period—currently you can only run this report by check date.
Year-to-Date Report	This report shows total earnings, tax withholdings, and net pay for each employee.	Often used as a yearly overview. Based on year-to-date totals. Date range is always a standard calendar year. This report can be emailed if you have more than 100 employees at the company. This report may not be available if your company has greater than 500 employees and contractors (active or dismissed).
Paystubs	View your paystubs history	n/a
Employee Summary	This report shows information about your employees that include personal details, employment dates, compensation, federal withholding allowances, and state withholding allowances.	Certain sensitive information is excluded: Bank account details Social security number If this information is needed, contact us.
Contractor Payments	This report shows the payment method, date of payment, hours worked, additional earnings, and personal notes on each contractor payment.	Customizable. Contractor-version of the payroll journal report.
Contractor Information	This report shows information about your contractors that include personal details and their pay type.	Certain sensitive information is excluded: Bank account details Social security number If this information is needed, contact us.
Expenses	This report shows a summary of reimbursed expenses, and can be grouped: by check date, employee or expense category.	Date range for the report is limited to 90 days.  Report file-types available: PDF or CSV
Time off Balances	This report shows your employees’ accruals, hours used, and balances for each policy.	Need more detail than this summary report? Reference the Time Off Tracker for employees.
Time off Requests	This report shows your employees’ department, statuses of time off requests, policy type, request creation date, time off requested, notes from the request, and total hours.	Sick time and PTO hours are lumped. Pro tip: To customize the report per policy, try downloading it as a CSV and editing.  Need more detail than this summary report? Reference the Time Off Tracker for employees. Must be a Plus or Premium customer using PTO requests.
Time tracking hours	View your employee’s hours by pay period or select a custom date range	Must be a Plus or Premium customer using Gusto Time Tracking to see this report.
Payroll data export	This report allows you to download an Excel workbook with raw data for all of your payrolls (by year). This is the most comprehensive view of your payroll history.	Toggle between tabs in the Excel workbook to view additional data: Employee information Work locations Payroll information Earnings Taxes Deductions
Workforce Costing	Workforce costing reports—also known as labor or job costing reports—are used to help you understand your labor costs. You can run workforce costing reports by project (Plus and Premium customers only), job, or department.	Set up projects, jobs, and departments first. Then run a payroll journal report and group the data by job, projects, and/or departments to see the costs of each. Project: Create projects in the Time tracking section of your account. Once your employees track their hours to projects, you can run reports to see the payroll expenses required to complete each project. Job: Assign employees to jobs.  Departments: Organize your team by departments.
PPP loan forgiveness (CARES act)	Monitor payroll expenses to stay on track and apply for forgiveness.	Read the full article about the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) report.
Payrolls Prior to Gusto	This report shows all payrolls you added to the account before joining Gusto. This includes earnings, deductions, employee taxes, and employer taxes for each employee.	This information factors into your annual totals to ensure accurate year-end reporting. Cannot be downloaded as a CSV. You can also run a payroll journal report that includes the date range of the historical payrolls, this will give you a slightly different picture of the same information.
Taxes Prior to Gusto	This report shows any tax liabilities you elected for Gusto to debit and pay during onboarding.	An amount of $0.00 means you opted for Gusto to not pay that tax liability. The 'Liabilities as of Payroll date' may appear incorrect on occasion. This results when tax liabilities are entered as lump sums. Example: An unemployment liability entered for Q1 and Q2 will show the latest date (Q2) as the "Liabilities as of Payroll date." Review the agency payments report for confirmation of taxes paid.

Custom reports

Report name	Description	Additional information
Payroll journal builder	Build a custom payroll report using details about your employee’ past earnings, deductions, and taxes	Once built, you can save the custom report as a template and reuse it in the future by clicking Reports > Custom reports.
Employee report builder	Build a custom report using details about your employee’s personal and compensation information	Use the "Time period" field to see a snapshot of active employees on any given day or within a time period.  Once built, you can save the custom report as a template and reuse it in the future by clicking Reports > Custom reports.
Employment status	Employment status is not an official report we support, but you can use the Employee report builder (listed above) and add Employment status as a column option. Employment status options will differ between customers with Gusto-managed benefits and customers with third-party benefits.	Gusto-managed benefits customers will have a full range of statuses: full time, part time, active, and dismissed. All other customers will have active or dismissed as their options. Plus and Premium customers can utilize custom fields to add labels (e.g. full-time/part-time) to employee's profiles. Once added, these can be populated in custom reports. Please note: If you use custom fields to label employment status, you're responsible for ensuring those definitions are accurate for any other reporting purposes.

You may or may not see the reports below

Report name	Description	Additional information
Tax Deferrals	Review taxes you've deferred. This report will only appear if: You've opted into the Social Security Tax Deferrals from your COVID-19 section.	Deferred taxes will be owed in the future. Typically, 50% of the deferred amount is due at the end of 2021, and 50% is due at the end of 2022.
Tax Credits	Review tax credits you've used. This report will only appear if: You've opted into the Employee Retention Credit from your COVID-19 section OR; You've entered eligible COVID paid leave during payroll runs.	n/a
R&D tax credits	View all of your federal R&D tax credit claims.	Includes filing and credit savings summaries. Must be claiming the federal R&D tax credit to see this report.
Custom fields	See the custom information you have collected about your employees	Must be a Plus or Premium customer using custom fields to see this report.
FICA tip credit	At the end of the year, you can run a report to show you FICA tip credits, which help fill out Form 8846. You can also reference this report throughout the year to estimate your credit.	The credit applies only to tips received by employees serving food and beverage. It is not applicable to other tipped employees.

Follow the steps in the section below to run a report.

Gusto reports

1. Sign in to your Gusto admin account.
2. Click the Reports tab.
3. You can find Gusto's out-of-the-box reporting options by:
   • Searching for a report name
   • Browsing categories
   • Scrolling through all reports—listed alphabetically
4. Once you've clicked into a report, use the checkboxes to select any additional detail you would like to include (if applicable):
   • Detailed employee info, employee earnings breakdown, employer tax breakdown, employee tax breakdown, deductions and contributions, detailed totals, and more.

Customizable fields

1. Date Range and Year.
   • Annually, Quarterly, Monthly, or a Custom Date Range.
     • Note: Range is based on check dates rather than pay periods or processing dates.
2. Choose how you'd like to group the data (if applicable).
   • By employee, state, work location, department, or job.
3. Select the format, either CSV or PDF.
   • After you've downloaded it, you can print it for your records.
4. Click Generate Report.

The types of reports that can be downloaded from Gusto can be found in the Types of reports you can download dropdown above.

Custom payroll reports 

To run a payroll report with custom filters and dates, follow these steps: 

1. Sign in to your Gusto admin account.
2. Go to the Reports tab.
3. In the top-right of the page, click New Custom Report.
4. Choose Payroll report. 
5. Click Continue.
6. Under “Columns,” you can add or remove the categories of data you want. Click select columns to add more. 
   • Optional: You can reorder the report by dragging and dropping the columns.
7. Under “Check dates,” choose a time period. You can choose to see data between dates, before or after certain dates, or year-to-date. 
   • By default, all payroll items (up to 1 year of data) will be shown.
8. If you want to filter by department, specific employees, or work addresses, click select filters. 
9. To see what the report will look like before you download it, click Generate a preview.
10. Select how you'd like to view the report—CSV, PDF, or Excel.
11. If you’d like to run this report again in the future, click Save as template. 
12. Click Run report. 

Once your report is complete, it will download to your device in the format you selected. 

Custom employee reports 

Run a custom employee report

To run an employee report with custom filters and dates, follow these steps: 

1. Sign in to your Gusto admin account.
2. Go to the Reports tab.
3. In the top-right of the page, click New Custom Report.
4. Choose Employee report.
5. Click Continue.
6. Under “Columns,” click select columns to include more data. 
7. Once you’ve selected each column you want, click Done. 
   1. Optional: You can reorder the report by dragging and dropping the columns.
8. Choose a time period.
   • The time period is set to All time by default. This will include all employees who have ever been active in Gusto, including employees who have been dismissed or rehired. You can change this to a specific date or time period if you'd like to see a snapshot of active employees in a given period.
9. If needed, click Add filters to narrow down the data. 
   • You can filter by department, employment status, specific employees, and more.
10. If you want to see what the report will look like before you download it, click Generate a preview.
11. Select how you'd like to view the report—either CSV or PDF.
12. If you’d like to run this report again in the future, click Save as template.
13. Click Run report.

Once your report is complete, it will download to your device in the format you selected. 

Report on dismissed employees

One type of custom employee report you can run is a dismissed employee report. For example, say you want a report on all employees dismissed before a certain date. Here’s how to run one:

1. Sign in to your Gusto admin account.
2. Go to the Reports tab.
3. In the top-right of the page, click New Custom Report.
4. Choose Employee report.
5. Select the columns you want to include.
   • You can drag and drop the columns to reorder your report.
6. Under “Time Period,” choose All time. 
7. Under “Filters,” click select filter. 
8. Choose Dismissed. 
9. Click Done. 
10. In the dropdown under the new “Dismissed” section, choose Before and select your date. This will give you a list of all employees dismissed before that date. 
    • You can also set the time period to After and choose your date, which will give you a list of people dismissed from that date forward.  
11. If you want to see what the report will look like before you download it, click Generate a preview.
12. Select how you'd like to view the report—either in a CSV or PDF.
13. If you’d like to run this report again in the future, click Save as template. 
14. Click Run report. 

Once your report is complete, it will download to your device in the format you selected. 

Once you've organized your workers into departments, you can run a Payroll Journal, Benefits Report, Year-to-Date Report, or Contractors Report to see your information summarized by department.

• Learn more about departments—click the Create a new department dropdown in this article to start setting up departments. Click the Organize your team by departments dropdown to assign employees to departments.
• Learn more about  reports—check out this article and click the Run a workforce costing report accordion.

Run a report by department

1. Click the Reports tab
2. Under the "All reports" headline, choose one of the available reports.
3. Select any additional detail you would like to include:
   • Detailed employee info, employee earnings breakdown, employer tax breakdown, deductions and contributions, or detailed totals.
4. Select the Date Range and Year.
   • Annually, Quarterly, Monthly, or a Custom Date Range.
   • Note: Range is based on check dates rather than pay periods or processing dates.
5. Select what types of employees you’d like to include in the report.
   • All, Hourly, Salaried, or Specific Employees.
   • Select Pick Employees and add specific individuals to include in the report, then click Save & Continue.
6. Select to "Group By" Department.
   • You may also group by Employees or Work Location.
7. Click Generate Report.
8. Download the report as a CSV or PDF.

Once projects have been created, and employees have tracked hours to them, you’ll need to process payroll for the applicable date range before running a workforce costing report for that timeframe.  

At this time, Gusto Project Tracking is not compatible with pay schedules set up by "employee type". 

To run the report after processing payroll(s):

1. Sign in to your Gusto account.
   • Make sure you’re viewing your admin profile.
2. Click the Time tools section and select Time tracking.
3. Click the Projects tile.
4. Click Generate report on the right-hand side.
5. Select the other details you’d like in the report:
   • What would you like to see in the report?
   • What information do you want the report to contain?
   • When and who should be included?
   • The report will default to being grouped by project.
   • What format you’d like the report in?
6. Click Generate report.
7. Click Download CSV in the top-right corner of the screen.

To run a new report grouped by project, but with different information, start the process again.

This report is available to Plus and Premium customers only—you can change your Gusto plan at any time.

The time off balances report provides information on your employees’ time off accrual, usage, and ending balances for a specific date range. 

• Important: Some states, like California, require employers to give their employees updated reports of their unused time off. You can meet this requirement by following the steps below then providing the time off balances to your employee(s) when you pay them. You can also give your employees access to Gusto and then provide these instructions for how they can locate this information in Gusto themselves.

Because certain states require time off balances to be paid when an employee leaves a company, Gusto also calculates a PTO liability based on an employee’s PTO balance and their current primary rate of pay.

• Gusto will automatically pay out unused PTO upon dismissal, if you do not wish to pay out unused PTO and you are located in a state where that is acceptable per state law, you must zero out the employee’s PTO balance and remove them from the PTO policy before dismissing them.

To view, download, and/or print the Time off Balances Report:

1. Go to the Reports section from the left-menu.

2. Search for "Time off balances" or scroll the report under the "All reports" header.

3. Select the Time off balances report.

4. The report will automatically include:

   • Employee name

   • Accrued time (will account for any time that was reduced at the beginning of the year due to max carryover rules)

   • Hours used

   • Ending balance

5. Check the box Paid Time Off Liability total to view the liability associated with PTO if it was to be paid out when the employee leaves the company

6. Select the time period for the report.

   • Annual, Quarterly, Monthly, or a Custom date range.

     • Important: If you select a time period before January 1, 2019, Gusto will default to a basic version of the Time off Report. For this reason, you cannot enter a custom date range that spans back to 2018.

7. Select the employees to include in the report.

   • All or specific employees

8. Select how you would like to Group the report.

   • By employee or department

9. Click Generate Report.

Check out this article for the other types of reports you can download.

FAQs

Q: When will a request show up in the report?

A: Time Off Requests report - A request will populate as soon as it is submitted. Time Off Balances report - A request will populate once the payroll it’s tied to has been paid out (ie. on or after the check date). Manual adjustments will be displayed in the Time Off Balances report immediately.

Q: If the report is run with custom dates that overlap a policy rollover rule, how will accruals reflect?

A: Rollover accruals happen once payroll is run after the rollover day. If the report date range includes the day payroll is run, rollover balances will be displayed.

Q: How does the report treat employees who were unenrolled from a time off policy?

A: Since the liability is no longer paid if an employee is removed from a policy the unenrolled employee will only show up in the report if the date range is for a period where the employee was on the policy. This same logic applies to dismissed employees

Q: If I disable my policies, will I still be able to run historical reports?

A: Yes, as long as the policy was active during the date range you run it for historical data will populate.

Q: If an admin is given permissions for just PTO - will they be able to run the reports for time off that we're rolling out?

A: If an admin is given the permission “Manage Time Tracking and PTO” they will be given access to run both the time off balances & time off requests report. Note: They cannot populate outstanding liability (because this shows an employee’s pay rate information).

To locate this report, follow these steps: 

1. Click the Payroll section and select Payroll history.
2. Hover over the check date and click View Details. 
3. Click the Cash Requirements Summary link below the "Debited by Gusto" headline.

Total Payroll

• Total Cash Remitted by Gusto
• Total Check Payments
• Total Liabilities

Summary

Debits - money debited from the company bank account

• Total Direct Deposits
• All money directly transferred to employees

Total Reimbursements

• All tax-free money paid out in this payroll

Total Taxes 

• All taxes paid by both the employee and the company

Liabilities - money remaining in the company bank account that needs to be paid 

Total Benefits (Employee And Company)

• All deductions and contributions for benefits

Total Employee Garnishments

• All money withheld from employees for wage garnishments

Total Other Deductions (Employee And Company)

• All other money withheld 

Checks

Total Check Payments

• Checks that have been written and delivered to employees

Debit Details - these values are broken down by employee

Total Direct Deposits Summary

• Total Reimbursements Summary
• Total Taxes Summary
• Total Unpaid Taxes Summary

Liability details - these values are broken down by employee

Benefits Liability Summary 

• Employee deductions
• Company contributions

Other Deductions Liability Summary

• Employee deductions
• Company contributions

Garnishment Liability Summary 

• Employee deductions
• Company contributions

Check details - these values are broken down by employee

Total Checks Summary

A workers’ comp audit can happen when a policy expires or is cancelled (both voluntarily or involuntarily). When the policy is audited, the carrier (e.g. Hartford, Travelers, etc.) will send a notice, either via email or mail, requesting specific documentation to confirm the actual payroll amounts run throughout the policy term.

Policy audits help determine:

• If the company owes any additional money, or;
• If the company needs to be refunded by the carrier. 

Pay-as-you-go workers’ comp policies aim to reduce the likelihood of an audit by assessing the premium amounts based on actual payroll, but an audit of the policy is still possible.

If you've received a notification from your carrier asking you to complete an audit, Gusto can help you access related documents and reports in your account, but we cannot legally respond to the audit on your behalf or advise on how to complete the audit. 

If you're a NEXT Insurance customer, you can reach out to [email protected] for additional guidance.

Documents and reports that can help

• Quarterly tax forms (ex. 941s)
• Run a payroll journal report for the applicable timeframe.
  • Learn how to access and run a payroll journal report in the How to run a Gusto report or build a custom report dropdown above. 

If you have a Health FSA, Dependent Care FSA, or Commuter benefit account through Gusto, you'll receive a monthly disbursement report that provides a list of approved claims and card transactions from the previous month.

This report will be emailed to your benefits administrator on the first of each month and will help you reconcile the MBI/Med-I-Bank debits on your company’s bank account. MBI debits on the company bank account will be the total approved claims and card transactions posted on the previous day. To reconcile the debit with the report, you will need to add each transaction and/or claim with a "Settlement Date" of the day prior to the debit.

If you want the report at a different frequency, need a one-off report, or would like a report with alternative information, please reach out to our team and we can assist.