As a plan sponsor for a 401(k) plan, you are required to have a bank account on file to fund contribution collections and possibly any associated invoicing for the plan.
If you recently received notification regarding an ACH failure or that Guideline has been unable to pull funds from your bank account, then your banking institution may have security in place to protect against unauthorized ACH transactions.
In this case, Guideline will be unable to pull funds from your account until you whitelist our ACH IDs with your bank. It’s important to fix banking issues as quickly as possible, as failure to timely remit 401(k) contributions will result in excise tax penalties imposed by the IRS, as well as payment of lost earnings to participants.
How to fix banking issues
To resolve bank failures, we recommend contacting your bank and providing the whitelist IDs below. Note that all IDs are solely numbers.
Invoices from WFMSTRIPE1 whitelist:
1800948598
4270465600
Contributions from SSBTrustOps or Guideline 401(k) whitelist:
0431848772
If the code 0431848772 above is unsuccessful, please also have the bank whitelist the same code with the 0 removed and a space (just one spacebar keystroke) in its place: [SPACE]431848772
In addition, please confirm the following to ensure payments will be processed correctly:
Guideline is authorized to submit ACH pulls from the account.
There is no ACH limit on the account.
The bank account is a checking account and not a savings account.
The account and routing numbers have been entered correctly into Guideline.
How to change your banking information
If you’d prefer to change the bank account on file for your plan, you can do so within your sponsor dashboard. You can find step-by-step directions on the process here.
Please note, if your new bank has similar security measures in place, you may be required to share the whitelist IDs with the new bank, as well.
Reprocessing missed contributions and payments
Once you’ve made all the necessary adjustments, please notify our sponsor support team, so we can attempt to reprocess your failed ACH. Depending on the type of failure, here’s how Guideline will reprocess the payment:
Contributions:
Our finance team will re-trigger the ACH collection for any missed contributions upon your confirmation that bank issues are resolved. You can expect to see this debit from your bank account within two business days.
Invoices:
Guideline will roll any outstanding invoices into the next month’s billing cycle. You can expect to see that invoice by the 10th business day of the following month.
Please note that Guideline is unable to process ad-hoc payments for monthly invoices outside of the normal billing cycle.