Gusto runs your US payroll, Peoplifi runs everything else: HR records, performance reviews, time tracking, and onboarding. The Peoplifi → Gusto integration syncs employees, pay rates, time worked, and PTO usage so payroll runs end-to-end without copy-paste. Most customers save 4 to 8 hours per pay cycle with the integration enabled.
Try Peoplifi Free for 7 DaysMost customers keep Gusto for US tax filing because of its deep state-by-state coverage. Peoplifi sits on top as the system of record for HR, time, and reviews. The integration removes the manual data entry between the two.
Yes — that is one of the most common patterns. Peoplifi handles non-US employees natively and pushes US employees' time and pay-rate updates to Gusto for filing.
Employee changes sync within 5 minutes. Time-worked hours push at the end of each pay period or on demand. Paystubs sync back within 30 minutes of Gusto running payroll.
Peoplifi flags the employee as terminated in Gusto with the correct effective date so the final payroll run includes them. Manual confirmation is required for severance or final-pay edge cases.
Bonuses, commissions, and one-off compensation entered in Peoplifi push to Gusto as off-cycle payroll items, with the appropriate tax treatment (supplemental wages at the IRS-defined rate or aggregate method depending on your Gusto configuration). The audit trail in Peoplifi shows the source approval, and the Gusto paystub reflects the bonus as a separate line.
Yes. A pay-rate change in Peoplifi with a retroactive effective date triggers Gusto to compute and pay the back-pay for the relevant period, applying the correct tax treatment. Both systems retain the audit trail of the change request, approval, and payout.
The OAuth setup requires Gusto admin authorisation once. After that, the OAuth token operates with the scoped permissions Gusto granted (employee management, payroll runs, time data) — no Gusto admin access is exposed to Peoplifi staff. Token revocation from either side cleanly disables the connection.
Gusto is one of the most popular US payroll platforms, particularly strong for SMB and mid-market employers running US-based employees across multiple states. Its breadth of state tax coverage, automated W-2 and 1099 generation, benefits administration, and modern UX make it the default US payroll engine for many growing companies. But Gusto's HR module is intentionally light — performance reviews, multi-country HR, advanced time tracking, and global onboarding aren't core. Peoplifi fills these gaps cleanly: HR system of record, multi-country employee management, performance reviews, learning and development, advanced time tracking, and onboarding workflows. Combined, the stack gives US-and-international employers the best of both worlds without the gaps either system would have alone.
The Gusto-Peoplifi integration runs a two-way sync covering the data that needs to be consistent between both systems. From Peoplifi to Gusto: new hires (with start date, pay rate, classification, W-4 elections), pay-rate changes, termination notices, time-worked totals per pay period, PTO usage by employee, bonus and commission payouts. From Gusto to Peoplifi: paystub PDFs (mirrored in the employee's Peoplifi profile), gross-to-net amounts (for HR reporting), tax filing confirmations (so HR knows tax obligations were met), benefit-deduction details (where benefits administration is in Gusto). Both directions run on a continuous sync — most updates propagate within minutes.
Both Gusto and Peoplifi support multiple pay schedules (weekly, biweekly, semimonthly, monthly) and multiple PTO policies. The integration setup maps Peoplifi schedules to corresponding Gusto schedules, ensuring that time-worked pushes hit the right pay period in Gusto. Similarly, PTO policies are mapped so that an employee taking a vacation day in Peoplifi correctly reduces their Gusto PTO balance. This bidirectional consistency eliminates the reconciliation effort that plagues less-integrated stacks.
Many growing US-headquartered companies have a mix of US W-2 employees and international employees (full-time staff in other countries, contractors, or employees through PEOs). Peoplifi handles all employees globally as the system of record; only US W-2 employees flow to Gusto for tax filing. The integration is configured per employee or per legal entity to determine which population is synced. International employees in Peoplifi never appear in Gusto, avoiding any confusion about tax-filing obligations.
Each sync event is logged in both Peoplifi and Gusto, with correlation IDs that allow tracing a specific change end-to-end. If a payroll discrepancy is detected (e.g., during year-end W-2 reconciliation), the audit trail shows exactly when each piece of data flowed between systems and who initiated the underlying change. This is materially better than the legacy alternative of CSV exports and manual data entry, where errors are hard to trace and reconciliation is a lengthy manual process. For SOX-compliant or audit-heavy organisations, the documented automation is a meaningful internal-controls improvement.