# Payroll readiness board for every Gusto hire you are onboarding

> See every new hire who is not payroll ready yet, exactly which steps are still missing, and fix them without opening Gusto.

- Workflow type: app
- Services: Gusto, Gmail
- Categories: HR & People, Operations
- Published: 2026-08-24

## What it does

- Shows one card per hire who is still being onboarded, with a plain checklist of the exact steps left before they can be paid
- Confirms the things people forget: a job on file, a pay rate set, a pay schedule assigned, and a complete profile
- Floats the riskiest hires to the top by counting the days left until their next pay date, so nobody quietly misses payroll
- Lets you fix profile details, put someone on the right pay cycle, and mark onboarding finished right from the card
- Drafts a personal chase email for each hire that lists only their own missing items, and sends it after you approve it

## What you'll need

- A Gusto account with permission to view and edit employees, jobs, pay rates, and pay schedules
- A Gmail account to send the chase emails from
- At least one pay schedule already set up in Gusto, so the board can work out upcoming pay dates
- Work email addresses on your hires' records, so chase emails have somewhere to go

## Prompt

Build me an app that my HR ops team opens every morning during a hiring push. It answers one question: which of our new hires are not payroll ready yet, and what exactly is still outstanding for each of them. The main screen is a board of cards, one card per hire, and the whole point is that someone works out of this board and fixes things in place instead of switching over to Gusto.

Populate the board from Gusto List Employees filtered to employees still in onboarding. For each hire, enrich the card with four more reads. Get Employee Onboarding Status gives the onboarding state and the remaining steps, which is the backbone of the checklist. Get Employee Jobs confirms whether a job actually exists and gives the hire date and job title. List Job Compensations on that job confirms whether a real pay rate is set rather than left at zero or blank. Get Employee fills in the profile so we can spot gaps such as a missing work email, home address, or start date. Run these enrichment reads in parallel per hire and cache them, because a hiring push can mean thirty or forty cards on screen and I do not want the board to crawl.

Each card shows the hire's name, job title, start date, and a checklist of only the outstanding items, written in plain language rather than raw step names from the API. Derive the checklist from everything you read: the remaining steps Gusto reports, plus our own derived checks for no job on file, no pay rate set, no pay schedule assigned, and missing profile fields. Completed steps collapse into a quiet summary line like "6 of 9 done" so the card stays focused on what is left. Show a clear payroll ready state on cards where the checklist is empty and onboarding just needs finishing.

The default sort is the most important detail. Sort by days remaining until the hire's next pay date, ascending, so anyone at risk of missing payroll floats to the top. Work that out by reading List Pay Schedules for the company, List Pay Schedule Assignments to see which schedule each hire is on, and Preview Pay Schedule Dates to get the upcoming pay periods and check dates. Show the countdown on the card as something like "Pay date in 3 days" and style it as at risk when the countdown is short and the checklist is not empty. A hire with no pay schedule assigned at all is the worst case, so surface those at the very top with an explicit note that no pay cycle is set rather than hiding them from the sort because their date is unknown.

Let me group the board by hire cohort or by department. Cohort means grouping by start date, for example everyone starting the same week or month, which is how people think during a hiring push. For department grouping, use the department or job title carried on the employee and job records, and put anyone without one into an "Unassigned" group rather than dropping them. I also want quick filters for at risk only, missing pay rate, missing job, and not yet chased, plus a search box for names.

From a card I need to fix things directly. Update Employee handles profile corrections such as name, work email, or address. Assign Pay Schedules puts a hire onto the right pay cycle, with a picker listing the company's real pay schedules and a preview of what that assignment means before I commit. Update Employee Onboarding Status moves a hire between onboarding states. Finish Employee Onboarding is the final action, and it should only be enabled once every step on the card is clear, with a tooltip explaining what is still blocking it when it is disabled.

Important technical detail: Gusto uses optimistic concurrency on mutable resources. Every write, including Update Employee and the pay schedule and onboarding status writes, has to send back the current version string that came with the record you read. If Gusto returns a 422 with an Invalid Version error, that means somebody else changed the record since we loaded it. In that case re-read the record, refresh the card with the current values, and tell me my save did not apply so I can review and resubmit. Never silently drop the edit and never blindly retry over the top of someone else's change.

Add a "Chase outstanding items" button that starts a background agent. I select one or more hires, hit the button, and the agent works through each selected person: it reads what that hire is still missing from their card data, then drafts a short personalized email listing only that person's own gaps in plain language, with no jargon and no mention of other people. The drafts come back to me for review inside the app, I can edit them, and only once I approve does the agent send them through Gmail Send a Message to each hire's work email.

The draft and the send time have to land back on the card and persist, so the board remembers who was chased and when. Show a "Last chased 2 days ago" line on the card and let me open the exact email that went out. Use that history to stop double chasing: exclude anyone chased within a configurable recent window from the default selection, and warn me if I try to chase them again anyway. Someone who has already had a nudge this morning should not get a second one because a colleague also opened the board.

On sensitive data, keep full Social Security numbers out of the interface entirely. Never fetch, display, log, or put them in an email draft. The checklist can say that a tax detail or identity detail is still outstanding without ever showing the value, and if a step can only be completed inside Gusto itself then say so on the card and link out rather than trying to collect the sensitive value in our app. Apply the same restraint to bank account details.

Round it out with a header count of how many hires are not payroll ready and how many are at risk this pay period, a manual refresh, sensible loading skeletons while the per hire enrichment reads resolve, and a genuinely pleasant empty state for the day when every hire is payroll ready.

## How to customize

- Change how the board is grouped, for example by start date cohort, by department, or by job title
- Set how many days out counts as at risk, so hires close to a pay date get highlighted sooner
- Adjust the tone and signature of the chase email, and choose who it comes from
- Decide which checks matter to your team, for example whether a missing pay rate blocks a hire or just warns

## FAQ

### Does this change anything in Gusto automatically?

No. The board only saves a change when you click to save it. Editing a profile, assigning a pay schedule, or marking onboarding finished are all things you do deliberately from a card, and the chase email only goes out after you read the draft and approve it.

### Will employee Social Security numbers show up on screen?

No. Full Social Security numbers are deliberately kept out of the interface. The board tells you whether a required detail is still missing without displaying the sensitive value itself.

### What happens if someone else edits the same hire in Gusto while I have the board open?

Gusto rejects the save rather than overwriting their change, and the card refreshes with the latest information so you can review it and save again. Your edit is never silently dropped.

### How does it know who is at risk of missing payroll?

It works out the next pay date for the pay schedule each hire is on and counts the days remaining. Hires with the fewest days left and outstanding steps sort to the top of the board.

### Can it chase several hires at once?

Yes. Select the hires you want to chase and the board drafts a separate email for each one listing only that person's gaps. You approve them before anything sends, and the board records who was chased and when so the same person is not chased twice.

### Do I need to be a Gusto admin to use this?

You need a Gusto login that can view and edit employee records, jobs, and pay schedules. If your access is view only, the board still shows the checklist but the fix actions will not save.

Use this prompt in General Input: https://www.generalinput.com/prompts/payroll-readiness-board-for-every-gusto-hire-you-are-onboarding