Using Pleo - Bonzer
How Bonzer managed 700,000+ Euros of marketing spend seamlessly with Pleo
The challenge
Say hello (or hej) to Bonzer – a specialised SEO agency that believes the search dynamic is one of the most evergreen ways of ensuring you’re discovered as a business. Whether that’s Google, Bing or YouTube, the company prides itself on living in that dynamic and helping businesses across the Nordics connect with their audiences through search.
Founded in Copenhagen in 2017, Bonzer was one of Pleo’s Beta users and has been growing alongside Pleo since the beginning. And as the company grew, so did the business’s marketing activities (and spend), as well as its tech stack.
No source of truth for marketing spend
Ulrich had to jump between the different advertising platforms and Hubspot trying to piece together what had been spent across channels and how much needed to be paid out. Resulting in instances where Ulrich believed he was still within the marketing budget for the month, while Johannes was flagging he was 20% over.
Time lost to less important tasks
With an extensive tech stack generating roughly 200 receipts each month, it was difficult to keep track of all that spend, as well as manage the accounting of those receipts. Leaving Johannes with very little time to work on processes or plans that would have a bigger impact on the business.
Multiple external accountants across entities
When Johannes first joined Bonzer, each of the three entities (Denmark, Sweden, Norway) had external accountants as part of the month-end process. This of course meant more costs, but also required more time spent on keeping an overview and people management to ensure that all books were closed correctly.
The solution
A holistic spending solution that captures every single expense across the business, integrates with all entities' local accounting systems and keeps marketing spend in check.
“Two years ago, we internalised everything – with Pleo playing a big part in this. With Pleo’s multi-entity feature, we could set up the accounting integrations for all three entities directly from the platform allowing us to reach a point where everything related to our finance department could be handled by one person.” – Johannes Max Fichtner, CFO
The results
Being a CFO wearing pretty much all hats – from financial planning to cash flow optimisation to legal work – Johannes has better things to do than chasing people for receipts and managing multiple external accountants. Pleo has not only helped free up precious time for Johannes and Ulrich to work on more strategic matters together, but it has also led to higher productivity across the business.
Greater control and visibility of marketing spend
Ulrich and Johannes almost immediately saw the benefit of using Vendor cards to manage the business’s marketing spend. Now they have a single source of truth of how much has been paid towards marketing within a given month. It also allows Ulrich the autonomy of managing that budget himself with one single card dedicated to marketing.
Easy closing of the books across entities
Using Pleo’s multi-entity feature, Johannes now has a complete overview and better ownership of the total spend across the company (and no longer needs those external accountants). With the ability to integrate Pleo with each market’s accounting tool, they could internalise all accounting processes.
Huge cost (and time) savings
Ulrich estimates that Fetch (Pleo’s Gmail, Outlook & Microsoft 365 integration) saves five to six hours of work with people not needing to find and upload their receipts, equivalent to 10.000 DKK (approximately 1,000 GBP) per month.
More time for strategy
With 80-90% of the receipts coming through Pleo, Johannes spends only about one to two hours a month on the accounting of those 200 receipts – saving quite a lot of time. The core benefit we’re getting from Pleo is more of Johannes, in a strategic context, says Ulrich.
Holistic overview of where money is spent
With features like Pleo’s Analytics dashboard, Johannes gets that much-needed transparency into what money is being spent on, which is hugely important when carrying out regular reviews of costs across the business.
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