An Initial Look at Aditro’s Payroll Outsourcing Service
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By Dave Foxall
A Brief Review of Aditro’s Payroll Outsourcing Service
Aditro’s Company Overview
Aditro is a leading provider of solutions and services for HR, payroll and financial management for the Scandinavian countries (particularly Sweden, Norway, Finland and Denmark). The company has its roots in the beginning of 1960s, at the birth of the IT-industry. At the turn of the century – after some decades of mergers and acquisitions involving companies from various Nordic countries – a single unified organization came together under the Aditro banner. The company now consists of 1,300 skilled professionals based in Sweden, Finland, Norway, Denmark and Estonia.
Aditro has also broadened its provision to include the whole of Europe by being a founding member of the Payroll Services Alliance (PSA); a group of five leading regional payroll providers covering almost 30 countries. The PSA’s combined client base makes them the number two European payroll provider (after ADP) by volume of payslips (5.5 million per month, according to the PSA website).
Aditro’s Payroll Outsourcing Service Offering
Aditro offer the full end-to-end payroll outsourcing service; including the receipt of materials, their processing, pay calculation, payment, reporting and advisory services. The service package includes quality assurance and is delivered to a pre-agreed service level. The key features are:
Maintaining payroll system control information
Creating and maintaining information on each employee
Maintaining information on fringe benefits and deductions
Processing pay transactions
Processing information on absences from work
Processing holiday information
Salary reviews
End of employment relationship
Salary runs and payment
Statutory actions at the turn of the year
KELA applications and pay certificates (KELA is the Finnish social security institution, renowned for its complicated processes)
Archiving
Reporting
Customer support
As a member of the Payroll Services Alliance, Aditro clients can access payroll services for any country in Europe through a single point of contact, with unified invoicing; more than the usual subsidiary network of in-country partners, this is an altogether more cooperative, egalitarian model for global payroll, including five partners: Aditro, SD Worx (Belgium, France, Netherlands, Germany, Luxembourg); Elanor (Central and Eastern Europe); Seresco (Spain and Portugal); and Trianon (Switzerland).
The Aditro quality of service is assured by a number of activities:
Quality controls and audits (SAS70, ISAE3402 type II)
Continuous best practice improvements to the IT service management so that those comply with business needs, giving common unified terminology and definitions as well as clear defined interfaces both internal and towards customers
Practical project steering for actively planning and managing projects
Planned software testing with active steering
Software development using defined iterative software development process
Continuous software development process improvement activities
Aditro’s Customer Target Market
Aditro’s target market is not industry-specific at all. Direct clients include construction and housing company NCC Norway, oil and gas service provider Beerenberg, Norway’s largest general insurance company Gjensidige Forsikring ASA, and the KF Group (a federation of 43 consumer cooperative societies in Sweden, with over 3 million individual members).
Aditro’s Perfect Prospect Profile (PPP)
For direct services, Aditro deals with clients in Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Norway and Estonia. Clients with a multi-country employee presence will particularly benefit from the unified service that Aditro can provide. For those in other European countries, Aditro would still be the client point of contact, but customers would in all likelihood be leveraging the network in the Payroll Services Alliance for the actual payroll processing.
Aditro’s Technical Specifications
Aditro’s services can be provided both on-premises and through the cloud via a software-as-a-service deployment model; currently, over 500 clients are accessing the SaaS version of Aditro’s services.
Aditro’s Primary Competitors
Other payroll outsourcing providers focused on the Nordic countries include Visma, Wise Management, Ecovis Norway, Silta HR1, and the Multi-data Bluegarden Group.
Strengths of Aditro’s Payroll Outsourcing Service
Expertise in five Scandinavian/Nordic countries
Commitment to quality improvement
Innovative partnering with Payroll Services Alliance
Weaknesses of Aditro’s Payroll Outsourcing Service
The expansion of the PSA beyond Scandinavia, France, Germany, and the Benelux nations only took place in late 2011; therefore the cooperation between Aditro and its new partners is still relatively new and potentially tenuous.
Customers outside of Aditro’s scope could inadvertently find themselves in a relationship with a less attractive vendor due to the Payroll Services Alliance arrangement-an issue that adds a layer of uncertainty to the already difficult task of choosing a payroll service provider.
Bottom-line for Aditro’s Payroll Outsourcing Service
Aditro combines a high degree of local Nordic expertise with the size opportunities of a large payroll operation. Certainly they have attracted some of the larger Scandinavian employers to become users of their services and the found of the PSA network offers a genuinely new model of multi-country payroll outsourcing, which speaks well to the company’s innovation. At the end of the day, as a provider Aditro holds a great degree of promise which is founded on a long history. Whether its latest ambitious venture (the PSA) will take European payroll by storm or not remains to be seen, but the company is a partner in a genuinely creative approach.
Aditro has also broadened its provision to include the whole of Europe by being a founder member of the Payroll Services Alliance (PSA), a group of five leading regional payroll providers covering almost 30 countries.”