We spoke with Payroll Process Owner and Controller Anna Åhlén about how Skovik supports Mercuri Urval’s international structure while remaining simple and intuitive for both employees and administrators.

Easy to use from the very beginning

For Anna, one of Skovik’s clearest strengths is how intuitive the system feels, both for employees submitting expenses and for administrators managing them.

It’s very self-explanatory, she says. You don’t really need an introduction. You sign in, and from there it’s easy to understand how to handle everything. The whole process feels straightforward, both as an employee and as an administrator.

She continues:

“The biggest advantage is probably how quick and smooth everything is. The app is very easy to use, which makes it simple to handle expenses continuously”.

Given the nature of their organisation, this is especially important for Mercuri Urval.

Our consultants are salespeople, and admin is not what they want to spend their time on. They want to focus on selling, so we aim to make their everyday work as easy as possible, Anna says.

Anna points to the system’s ability to reduce manual input and simplify decision-making as specific examples of how Skovik makes expense reporting easier:

“Employees don’t need to think much about how to categorise their expenses anymore, as they can often just accept the suggestions Skovik provides”.

Supporting a global organisation

As a global company operating across multiple countries, Mercuri Urval also needs a system that can adapt to local requirements and ways of working. Although Anna was not part of the original implementation, she has been involved in rolling out Skovik to additional countries over time.

It’s been a very good collaboration, she says when recalling the process. Skovik is very clear about what we need to provide from our side, and there’s always an ongoing dialogue around whether we want to make adjustments to the set-up.

Mercuri Urval has largely standardised the system across entities, while still allowing room for local adaptations where needed.

“We have a template for how we want things to look across all countries, but the reality is that different countries work differently. So it’s been very helpful that local adaptations have been easy to make”.

Approval flows have also been configured to support both local and central processes.

We’ve created local groups in different countries that handle the first approval stage, and then we come in for the second or third approval. It’s helpful to have these groups in place because it means everything doesn’t need to sit with one single person, Anna explains.

A proactive partnership

The collaboration with Skovik is just as important as the system itself, says Anna:

“It’s very easy to work with Skovik. You’re proactive and very quick when it comes to support. That’s incredibly valuable”.

She adds:

“Every now and then we receive information about new functionality and suggestions of things we could enable if we want to. We also try to have meetings roughly once a year just to align on what’s happening on our side and yours, and whether there’s anything that could affect our collaboration”.

When asked if she would recommend Skovik, Anna says that she absolutely would. In explaining why, she first returns to the user-friendliness and the support. Beyond this, Anna highlights another important benefit: peace of mind.

Skovik handles many of the legal and tax-related updates that happen over time, which means we feel very confident that things are handled according to regulations. That’s something I would definitely highlight as a major advantage, she says.