”Our employees practically do our work for us”

We spoke with Nils Larsson, who acts as financial lead for Sweden and Denmark in his role as Finance Manager. As of late, he’s been in charge of expanding their Skovik set-up to include their Danish entities. Our conversation included interesting insight into customising Skovik to company needs and what it means to Nordward to be able to gather the whole corporate group in one expense system.

An all around easy-to-use system

Nils was first introduced to Skovik at a previous place of work. His first impression of the system was that it was intuitive and easy to use, and his initial impression has stuck with him. It doesn’t take a genius to understand it, he says.

The newly added Danish employees are of the same opinion, says Nils: Everyone is really happy and thinks it’s really great.

The simplicity of the system stands out to Nils both when submitting his own expenses and when working in the back-end of the system:

“The system runs very smoothly. It’s brilliant when I’m traveling that Skovik calculates everything for me. Per diems can be pretty complex and tricky, but I like how it works in Skovik and how easy it is to set up. It’s great. And it’s generally really difficult to make mistakes, as a user and as an admin”.

He concludes: It’s an easy-to-use system that simplifies our expense handling.

Saving time through a personalised set-up

If Nils was to give advice to a company that’s considering Skovik, it would be for them to personalise it to their way of working. Skovik has solutions for most things. It comes down to communicating what you want, he says.

When I was using Skovik at a previous job, I remember we were initially under the impression that something about our way of working wouldn’t be possible to accommodate. But it turns out that it was, and it worked really well, he explains.

Nils had a similar realisation when setting up Nordward’s Danish entities:

“At first, we were thinking we’d have to set up what felt like a hundred separate expense categories, and have everyone find and select theirs each time they submitted an expense, in order to accommodate our complex way of working in Denmark. But then Sarah said that what we were trying to achieve could be solved in the back-end, without having to complicate things for the end-users. She said to just send across how we wanted it set up and then she handled it for us. It was really nicely done”.

In addition to this solution being helpful to the end-users, it’s very time-saving for those working in Skovik, says Nils: It saves us a lot of time on the finance side. It was a really great suggestion.

Achieving company goals with Skovik

Nils expands on the ways in which Skovik saves Nordward time at a later part of our conversation:

“Our expense reporting could have been a very complex task, but it’s not. I mean, the users do the work themselves, and it’s done correctly. It simplifies everything and makes the whole process more efficient”.

Being able to house the entire group in one system has also been of great value to Nordward, Nils says:

“All of a sudden we’re a unified corporate group, which means we all handle our expense management the same way and that we can support each other. That means a lot to us. Before, we were more so working in silos, but now we’re trying to help each other across the entire group. And that was part of my mission when I took on this role, to help us become one unified company”.

He elaborates:

“If we hadn’t been able to bring the companies together like this, I wouldn’t have been able to help the other companies with their expense reporting. Or well, I could have, but it would’ve taken forever and I would’ve gotten really frustrated”.

The themes that have emerged during our conversation become especially apparent when we ask Nils why he would recommend Skovik. He answers in just three words, but still manages to summarise our conversation perfectly: Simple, efficient, intuitive.