Bonzer empowers businesses in the Nordics to climb search engine rankings and reach new consumers. Founder and CEO, Ulrich Svarrer, shares how Pleo, one of Europe’s leading spend management platforms, has streamlined its marketing spend management, enabling Bonzer to spread the word about its best-in-class SEO services.
Bonzer was founded in 2017, as Svarrer identified a pressing need for high-quality, specialised marketing services from his time working in-house. He founded Bonzer with the core philosophy of providing tailored SEO strategies that deliver long-term, sustainable growth by increasing business’ visibility on search engines like Google, Bing and YouTube. It started in Denmark and has since expanded with local offices and entities in Sweden and Norway too – becoming one of the Nordics’ leading SEO service providers.
Bonzer specialises in helping businesses capitalise on owned traffic, generating a consistent and sustainable stream of visitors that delivers long-term results. This approach contrasts with the high costs of paid advertising, which ceases to provide value the moment the spending stops.
The challenge: Creating a holistic overview of spending
As an SEO provider, Bonzer understands how important marketing is in enabling the success of a business. Therefore, it placed a strong emphasis on its marketing efforts. However, this opened the business up to some issues.
As the person personally responsible for Bonzer’s marketing, Svarrer had to spend considerable time navigating multiple advertising platforms to gather financial data, including spend, outstanding payments and budget tracking. However, pulling actual billed spend information from such a variety of sources often led to inaccuracies, complicating the business’s financial oversight. “There would be times that I thought we were on track with our marketing budget but then the CFO, Johannes Fichtner, would flag to me that we had either overspent or underspent, due to the difference in technical spend and billed spend. Sometimes we were even out by up to 20%,” Svarrer said.
This wasn’t the only issue. Tracking from so many different sources was extremely time consuming, meaning that Svarrer was losing out on valuable headspace to prioritise other growth driving work for the agency and clients.
CFO Fichtner was similarly losing time to think about processes and plans that would have a big impact on the business, as he was having to track and manage over 200 marketing (and wider tech-related) receipts each month. On top of this, he was also having to manage external accountants for the business’ three subsidiaries across the Nordics, further increasing time spent on tracking vital financial information.
To free up valuable time for them both, as well as reduce spending discrepancies, Bonzer needed a single source of truth for its financial information.
The tools: Vendor cards, multi-entity features, receipt fetcher and analytics dashboard
By partnering with Pleo, Bonzer implemented a comprehensive spending solution that captured every expense across the business while integrating seamlessly with local accounting systems for all entities, ensuring tighter control over marketing expenditures.
The first step involved deploying Pleo’s vendor cards to manage marketing spend. These virtual cards offered a streamlined method for handling recurring payments and digital expenses, providing a clear distinction between supplier costs and employee expenses. This approach significantly improved transparency and efficiency in managing Bonzer’s financial operations.
Svarrer created a marketing-specific virtual card that was used for all one-off and recurring payments to advertising services. “Using a virtual card for marketing was exactly what I needed, as not only did it save a load of time by creating a single source of truth for marketing spend but by setting a spend limit on the card, it also ensured that I could never unknowingly go over budget,” he said.
Next, Bonzer deployed Pleo’s multi-entity feature – a tool that allows finance teams to manage spending across multiple entities. Using this, Fichtner could accurately track how much was being spent across Bonzer’s three Danish, Swedish and Norwegian subsidiaries, instead of employing external accountants to do so.
Alongside creating efficiencies for Svarrer and Fichtner, integrating Pleo’s tools also opened up opportunities for the wider Bonzer team to cut down on manual processes. By integrating the ‘Fetch’ tool with email inboxes, employees could automatically source the correct digital receipt for any expenses they had input into the system, meaning they would never have to manually look themselves.
The results: Increased business productivity through the reduction of manual processes
Pleo’s tools not only freed up valuable headspace for Svarrer and Fichtner by automating processes and minimising discrepancies, as they had hoped, but also paved the way for greater productivity across the entire business. By creating a holistic overview of Bonzer’s spending, Pleo enabled more efficient operations, allowing the team to focus on strategic growth rather than administrative tasks.
“Being a marketing expert is what you’d expect from the CEO of an SEO provider. However, I had so many conflicting priorities to manage, including business growth and strategy, that I couldn’t accurately track marketing spend,” Svarrer said. “However, Pleo enabled us to bypass the issue, tracking marketing spend for me. Now I can focus on both marketing and the hundreds of other priorities I have.”
Fichtner also benefitted greatly. With around 90% of the 200+ receipts he managed each month now processed through Pleo, the time spent consolidating financial information at month-end was drastically reduced. The multi-entity feature further enhanced efficiency, eliminating the need for external auditors to review Bonzer’s three entities at the end of each month. All the necessary financial information was now instantly accessible.
Additionally, having all financial data readily available allowed Fichtner to leverage Pleo’s analytics dashboard, enabling him to monitor the company’s spending in real-time and review business expenses whenever required.
For the wider business, Pleo delivered substantial benefits. Employees now save up to six hours per month by using Fetch, which automatically tracks receipts — a time savings equivalent to approximately £1,000 per employee.
Goals for the future
Looking ahead, Bonzer aims to continue expanding its business through precise, strategic marketing to consistently deliver the high-quality SEO services businesses rely on. Pleo’s spend management platform empowers Bonzer to refine its marketing spend continually, ensuring that business funds are used thoughtfully and efficiently. Svarrer said: “Pleo has given us a clear, accurate overview of our marketing spend. Beyond eliminating concerns around budget mismanagement, we’re now able to make more informed decisions on which marketing activities provide the most value, enabling us to grow effectively across the three markets we serve.”