Payroll onboarding at Collective is now 95% faster, and most members finish it entirely on their own. With roughly 80% fewer setup tickets, Collective’s Member Relationship Managers have traded paperwork for proactive advice.
Collective runs the back office for solopreneurs. The platform forms your LLC or S Corp, keeps the books, runs payroll, and files taxes, and pairs every member with a team of accountants and tax advisors. Payroll has always been central to that promise, and Collective’s team has always made sure members got there: often by walking them through it personally.
In early 2026, Collective’s accounting and payroll team rebuilt its payroll onboarding using the Gusto Embedded Payroll SDK, with the goal of letting members complete setup on their own in just minutes. This new onboarding launched in May 2026.
The results speak for themselves: the typical new Collective member now finishes payroll onboarding more than 95% faster, in part because the new SDK-powered design allowed members to completely self-onboard to payroll. Members now finish without help from a Member Relationship Manager, and Collective reports roughly 80% fewer onboarding support tickets.
The starting point: a high-touch process Collective wanted to scale
Collective had already built a working payroll product on Gusto Embedded’s pre-built Flows, and members were onboarding successfully. Sometimes, though, they needed help from Collective’s team in the process.
Payroll setup for a new S-corp owner takes more than a few clicks. It asks someone to make decisions about pay schedules, tax jurisdictions, and bank verification that most first-time business owners have never encountered. Collective’s Member Relationship Managers managed that complexity on members’ behalf: when someone stalled, they got on a call and walked through it step by step.
“We had friction where some new customers would leave the onboarding and get on a call when they got stuck,” said Swapnali Kulkarni, who leads engineering for accounting and payroll at Collective.
If they didn’t have all of the required documentation on hand at the start, “it would sometimes take a few sessions over several weeks for a new customer to be fully onboarded,” said Kaleb Davis, the engineer who rebuilt the onboarding.
That experience, Swapnali said, “hindered time to value.” For a solopreneur watching a tax deadline approach, that wait can add anxiety to the process.
The other constraint was structural. Setup ran inside an iframe, which meant members saw two progress timelines at once: Collective’s own overall onboarding steps alongside payroll-specific onboarding steps inside the iframe. Collective could pre-populate what it already knew about a member, but had limited ability to add its own context around it. “If we wanted to educate the member on why we are asking you this information, there was no way to do that,” Swapnali said. “So either they got it or they didn’t. And if they didn’t, they’d need to reach out.”
Collective knows its members and knows what reassurance they need at each step. The team wanted to be able to say it in the flow itself, rather than saving it for a phone call. So they set out to move the education upstream, into the product.
“In the happy path cases, we have seen members complete the setup in one session, under 30 minutes, which was never the case before.”
Why the SDK, not the API
Collective evaluated building against the Gusto Embedded API versus adopting the SDK’s prebuilt React components, and chose the SDK for two reasons that pulled in the same direction.
The first was speed. “At Collective, we wanted to move fast. We wanted to rebuild the payroll setup to improve the user’s experience quickly,” Kaleb said. “It takes a lot of lift off our plate when we can rely on the SDK components. They handle things like validation, especially for more complex scenarios like the pay schedule component, where there’s lots of internal logic around pay schedule. To be able to have the SDK handle that as opposed to all of it handled locally was just a tremendous help to engineering. It took a big load off of us.”
Pay schedule is a good example of the work partners tend to underestimate: rules that are easy to describe, complex to implement correctly, and subject to change.
The second reason was that speed did not cost them the experience they wanted. “We still were able to have the customizability that we needed with the SDK, with the design, and being able to insert contextual education tailored to our user base within the payroll setup,” Kaleb said. “So just the mix of customizability and speed of development made us choose the SDK.”
That combination is the point of the SDK. The API gives you full control and full responsibility. The SDK handles the plumbing while leaving the surface yours.
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Fewer onboarding support tickets.
Questions that used to require a support ticket are now resolved with in-line context.
The build: overrides first, then it got easy
Collective holds a high bar for visual consistency and was not willing to ship something that felt bolted on. “The main lift at the start was to get a lot of our common components like buttons or select fields ready to be used by the SDK,” Kaleb said.
That investment paid off immediately after. “Once all these modifications were in place, it was very simple,” he said. “The SDK components themselves access these overrides that we defined, and then the component is in our style.”
Buttons, fonts, link colors, and select fields all came through matching Collective’s natively built components. Layout was the one place the team wanted more control than component-level modifications provided. “On places where we very much valued layout, we were able to work with the SDK team to use a hook approach, allowing us to achieve the full design that we wished for,” Kaleb said. Collective used hooks for pay schedule and standard SDK components everywhere else.
The results: a typical setup now finishes in one sitting
Before the relaunch, half of Collective’s members took longer than half a day to finish payroll setup. After, the typical member finishes in under half an hour, an improvement of more than 95%.
“We did see a very big drop in time for how long it took users to complete the setup flow,” Kaleb said, “from when they completed the first step to when they were fully done with the flow.” Swapnali put the outcome plainly: “In the happy path cases, we have seen members complete the setup in one session, under 30 minutes, which was never the case before.” Some members finish in a few minutes.
The long tail moved too, which matters more than it might appear. The slowest ten percent of members went from about two weeks to about three days. Those are the members who previously needed the most hand-holding, and the ones for whom a stalled setup did the most damage to time-to-value.
Collective — embedded payroll
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Faster payroll onboarding.
Members who once spent days getting payroll set up now finish in under 30 minutes.
The change Collective’s team notices most is where their Member Relationship Managers (MRMs) now spend their time. “The support tickets, the hand-holding tickets that our MRMs used to have, went down as well,” Swapnali said. Roughly 80% fewer, in the team’s estimate. “We noticed a huge drop in tickets where we had to complete the setup for members.”
That gave the MRM team more time to be proactive with new members, providing additional value like identifying tax optimization opportunities rather than spending their time on paperwork.
And when members do hit a wall, Collective’s team is still right there. The remaining sticking points are practical rather than product-related: members who do not have their bank account details on hand, for example.
“We are always trying to make sure our members are able to self-serve as much as possible,” Swapnali said. “And the SDK components really made that possible. The whole onboarding is more or less self-serve. You don’t really need anybody else.”
The result is a setup experience that scales with Collective’s growth, and the member relations team now spends its expertise where it counts.
Advice for partners evaluating the SDK
Two things Collective’s team would tell a partner starting today.
Get design alignment early. Before development starts, work through which components, colors, layouts, and configurations you will use. Gusto’s SDK documentation site covers this ground. Starting there will save your design team time.
Ask for what you need. Kaleb’s advice: engage the Gusto SDK team early and directly. “I was a little hesitant to ask at first for direct changes, but the SDK team was happy to help and take lots of our feedback into consideration,” he said. The hook-based approach exists in part because Collective pushed for it, which helped every partner who has used it since.
What’s next for Collective
Collective is expanding on both fronts. On product, the team is preparing to accept members who already have employees and contractors, rather than solo entrepreneurs only, along with the benefits and insurance needs that come with a team.
On the SDK, Collective and Gusto are actively discussing several more areas. “A lot of the payroll dashboard pieces we have right now are still the embedded iframe, and they’re strong candidates to migrate to SDK components in the future,” Kaleb said, “So we can add our customization and relevant contextual information to these as well.”
Ready to build with the SDK?
If you are an existing Gusto Embedded partner running Flows or API-built payroll surfaces, the SDK can replace them incrementally, one at a time, as Collective did. If you are evaluating embedded payroll for the first time, the SDK is the fastest path to a payroll experience that looks and feels like your product.
Explore the docs at sdk.gusto.com or talk to our team.
