Guideline Pro is a platform for financial and benefits professionals that’s free to join. As a Guideline Pro, you can offer your clients an easy-to-administer 401(k), plus get the tools to design, monitor, and manage all of their plans in one place.

Guideline Pro provides added value to you and your clients, at no additional cost. You have access to a dedicated relationship manager and a dashboard that lets you invite, monitor and manage all of your clients’ plans in one place.

Pursuant to separate agreement(s) between you and your clients, Guideline can process and pay advisory fees owed by your clients to you. Guideline will pay the advisory fee out of the Plan participants’ accounts based on assets under management. The advisory fee will be prorated daily based on each active participant’s account balance and deducted directly from each active participant’s account quarterly and paid to the advisor in arrears. If you are interested in having Guideline process your advisory fee, you will have to provide the RIA W9 and ACH Bank Account for the RIA when you set up your Guideline Dashboard.

Guideline’s monthly fees are paid by your client directly to Guideline.

Yes you can. With your Guideline Pro dashboard, you can see all of your clients’ plans—completed and in progress. For new plans, Plan fiduciaries (including trustees, administrators, and investment committee members)can help design the plan, track progress, and streamline the approval process to get it up quickly.

Yes, you will be introduced to your dedicated Relationship Manager after you join Guideline Pro and connect to your free advisors dashboard.

Once a plan is set up, we take care of recordkeeping, investment management, most government filings, and more. We integrate with 15+ different payroll providers and charge low monthly fees with no transaction fees.

Clients can add certain eligibility requirements, profit sharing, vesting schedules, matching options, and more depending on the plan. However, some of these features, like eligibility, vesting, and allocation requirements, can’t be based on an employee earning a certain number of hours of service.

Auto enrollment is a required feature for all Guideline 401(k) plans. Auto enrollment can help improve IRS nondiscrimination testing results, increase employees’ retirement readiness, and much more. With the passing of Secure 2.0, beginning in 2025, auto-enrollment will be required on almost all new 401(k) plans established on or after December 28, 2022. Learn more about auto enrollment

With Guideline, participants can create a custom portfolio from our fund menu or choose one of 6 different managed investment portfolios. Each portfolio is diversified with funds from low-cost providers giving them an average expense ratio under 0.07%. When combined with a 0.15% account fee the estimated total cost of an active participant investing in one of Guideline’s managed portfolios can be under 0.22% — that’s up to 7x less than the industry average.

We do not at this time. Target date funds tend to have higher expense ratios for participants. We lower these fees by building the portfolios ourselves, and still give participants the flexibility to choose investments that serve a shorter or longer term investment strategy. Read more here