Manage pre-tax benefit accounts in Gusto
This article is for admins who offer pre-tax benefit accounts managed by Gusto.
Note: If you only use Gusto to report on a pre-tax benefit account that you manage outside of Gusto, this article does not apply.
If you offer a pre-tax benefit account managed by Gusto (including the broker integration), we debit your company’s primary bank account to fund accounts like Health flexible spending accounts (FSA), dependent care FSAs, Health Savings Accounts (HSA), and commuter accounts. We do not have access to your company’s bank statement. Contact your bank for this information.
Important: To allow debits for your pre-tax benefit accounts with Elevate, you need to contact your company’s primary bank and whitelist the ACH code 1854135510. This requirement also applies if you change your company’s primary bank account in the future. If you do not whitelist the code, your team’s accounts could be temporarily locked, or HSA deposits could be reversed.
An HSA is an employee’s personal bank account. We fund it when we take payroll deductions and deposit them into their HSA.
Here are the debit details for HSA funding:
Debit timing: Five days after your payroll’s check date
Invoice notification: Your company’s primary payroll admin gets an email one day before the debit with invoice information.
To add other admins to these emails, contact us to provide their email. They need to be a benefits admin in Gusto. If they leave your company or should no longer get the emails, contact us again to remove them from the mailing list. To contact us, sign in to your Gusto account and click the help icon
in the top-right corner of the page.
Amount: The total of all employee HSA deductions and employer HSA contributions for a given payroll
Bank statement line item: Your bank statement shows this debit as “Gusto HSAcontrbt”
Health FSAs, DCFSAs, and commuter benefits are “notional accounts.” This means their balances are linked to your company bank account. Instead of debiting funds for each payroll deduction, we debit funds when employees use them.
Here are the debit details for notational accounts:
Debit timing: Debits can happen daily. We debit the total of all employee expenses from your bank account each day. For example, if three employees each spend $50, we debit $150 from your account. If no one uses their funds, we do not debit your account. These debits show up as “Gusto ReplenPaym” on your bank statement.
Invoice notification: Your company’s primary payroll admin gets an email one day before the debit with invoice information.
To add other admins to these emails, contact us to provide their email. They need to be a benefits admin in Gusto. If they leave your company or should no longer get the emails, contact us again to remove them from the mailing list. To contact us, sign in to your Gusto account and click the help icon
in the top-right corner of the page.
Bank statement line item: Your bank statement shows these debits as “Gusto ReplenPaym”
To reconcile pre-tax benefit account debits, download a report from the Reports section of your Gusto admin account.
The report you should choose depends on the debit you want to reconcile:
For HSA contribution debits: Use the HSA Contributions report.
For FSA, DCFSA, and commuter expense debits: Use the Pre-tax benefit account replenishment invoices report.
You can filter by the date of the debit. The report lists contributions and expenses by invoice. Each invoice relates to a specific lump sum debit.
Learn the steps to run a Pre-tax benefit account report.
If your company offers FSAs, DCFSAs, or commuter benefits through Gusto, you can run a report to check your team’s account balances.
Use the Pre-Tax Benefit Account Balances report. This report shows:
Employee account balance
Enrollment effective date
Total elected amount
Total contributions
Any rollover amounts
It covers the full plan year for each enrolled employee.
Learn the steps to run a Pre-tax benefit account report.
View HSA payroll deductions
If your company offers an HSA, run the Benefits Deductions report in your Gusto admin account. This report shows how much employees and the company have contributed through payroll.
The process for resolving a failed funding debit depends on the type of debit that was rejected.
Gusto HSA contribution debit fails
If an HSA contribution debit fails, we notify your company’s payroll admin and immediately reverse your team’s deposits. Once the issue has been resolved, forward this email to Gusto support, and we’ll redeposit the funds.
Note: Because we make second deposits individually, you get separate invoices and debits on your bank account for each deposit.
Gusto replenishment debit fails
If a replenishment debit fails, we notify your company’s payroll admin by email and temporarily lock your team’s accounts until the failure is resolved. We automatically retry the debit three times, giving you the opportunity to fix the issue as soon as possible. If the third attempt fails, we’ll work with you to resolve it. Your team’s accounts stay locked until the debit goes through.