Financial advisors
Help clients achieve their financial goals
You can help add retirement savings into your clients’ investment strategy — join Guideline Pro for free today.
See our Privacy Policy to learn how we use and protect your information
Grow with Guideline Pro
Guideline Pro is a platform for advisors, planners, and other financial and benefits professionals. It’s free to join and comes with tools and support — and of course seamless 401(k) plans for your clients.
- Guideline Pro dashboard
- Built-in billing
- Dedicated relationship manager
- Compliance testing
- Low, predictable costs
- Flexible plan design
Retirement plans you and your clients will love
Affordable pricing
Low and predictable monthly costs - making it easy for your clients to budget and plan.
All-in-one 401(k)
We handle recordkeeping, investment management, compliance testing, and more.
Employee support
Access to professionally managed portfolios, live support, a mobile app, and more.
Billing and fees
A retirement platform with built-in billing
When you set up a Guideline plan for your clients, you can add your advisory fee to their plans. Guideline will process your fee from participant accounts on a quarterly basis in arrears and send it to your firm.
Your client’s monthly plan fees due to Guideline will be paid by your client directly to us.
More state mandates are coming this year.
See if your clients will be impacted
We connect with popular payroll providers
With payroll integration, we can seamlessly connect their payroll and 401(k). Plus, automate employee onboarding, payroll deductions, and more. See payroll integrations
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Open an account in 5 minutes
We can walk you through the steps.
1
Schedule a demo
Reach out via phone or email to set up your account - there are no fees to join.
2
Add your clients
Invite clients directly from your dashboard.
3
Design their plans
Set up their 401(k) or work with your Relationship Manager to design a plan.
Stay on top of state mandates
Our relationship managers can help guide you through the different mandates and requirements.
Guideline at a glance
47K+
business clients
3,000+
Guideline Pro partners
$12B+
assets under management
Fintech 50
Help your clients modernize their retirement plan
See our Privacy Policy to learn how we use and protect your information.
Frequently asked questions
What is Guideline Pro?
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.
Why join Guideline Pro?
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.
How does Guideline process my advisory fee?
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.
How do clients pay their plan fees?
Guideline’s monthly fees are paid by your client directly to Guideline.
Can I design a plan on behalf of my clients?
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.
Will I have a dedicated point of contact at Guideline?
Yes, you will be introduced to your dedicated Relationship Manager after you join Guideline Pro and connect to your free advisors dashboard.
What are Guideline’s key services?
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.
What plan design features are available?
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.
Why auto enrollment?
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
What are the investment options?
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.
Do you offer target date funds?
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