With 2,200 employees across over 50 offices and more than 40,000 clients, BDO Norway is one of the country’s leading professional services firms.
In recent years, the organization has prioritized modernizing how it supports both its people and clients, guided by a clear strategy focused on employee development, futureproof technology, and exceptional service quality.
To bring this strategy to life, BDO Norway sought a unified system to transform the way it manages people, operations, and financial data.
The company turned to Workday to streamline processes, enhance data accuracy, and establish a strong foundation for strategic decision-making by leveraging Workday Human Capital Management (HCM), Workday Financial Management, and Workday Professional Services Automation (PSA).
“It’s the total package that is moving us forward,” shared Heidi Merethe Kalhagen, product manager Workday at BDO Norway.
You have the synergy between HCM, finance, and PSA data, streamlined processes, regular feature updates, and an AI platform that’s easy to adapt.
Product Manager Workday
Empowering people across the employee journey.
BDO Norway uses Workday to support the full employee lifecycle from onboarding to development, performance reviews, and eventually, offboarding. By centralizing data and standardizing processes, the company has enhanced transparency and consistency across its HR practices.
“We have standardized processes in Workday that support key stages of the employee journey, such as hiring, onboarding, and offboarding,” Kalhagen explained. “We’re also able to gather and maintain essential data, including contracts, questionnaires, and more.”
Performance and compensation reviews are directly aligned with strategic goals, helping ensure fairness and clarity in career development. BDO Norway also leverages Workday feedback tools to support ongoing evaluations and project-based feedback.
“We use performance check-ins and conduct compensation reviews aligned with performance evaluations,” said Kalhagen. “Our compensation matrix helps ensure salaries and bonuses are fair, consistent, and in line with employee contributions.”
Workday Learning has become a core component in managing training and compliance. “We are a strictly regulated company where training is both required and important for people development,” Kalhagen noted. “We use Workday Learning for that and we are tracking courses and certifications directly in Workday.”
BDO Norway also integrated Workday Peakon Employee Voice to continuously measure employee sentiment and increase responsiveness. “Now in 2025, we started with continuous listening. That makes us able to listen to our people and take action faster,” Kalhagen added.
Driving efficiency and accuracy in finance and operations.
In finance, BDO Norway has used Workday to significantly reduce the time required for its month-end close, moving from nine days to just five. This improvement was driven by streamlined time and absence tracking, daily revenue recognition, and standardized billing.
Employees record time and absences on a daily basis, and managers review and approve them in real time. With daily revenue recognition, monthly revenue sharing, and streamlined processes across the board, we’re able to provide accurate reporting and actionable insights to the right management levels.
Product Manager Workday
Expense processing is another area where automation and AI play a vital role. “We use three AI functionalities,” Kalhagen mentioned. “We use the distance calculation with Google Maps, we use the receipt scanning on mobile, and we use the email ingestion from Outlook.”
This intelligent automation ensures compliance with both legal and sustainability requirements while making the process smoother for employees.
Using real-time data to make informed decisions.
With Workday as its single system of record, BDO Norway has achieved real-time visibility across HR and finance. Using Workday Prism Analytics, the team creates custom KPIs, dashboards, and reports to support leadership at every level.
“We use both standard and custom reports and dashboards, though mostly custom,” Kalhagen reported. “We build calculated fields to generate the right KPIs for the business, and use target grouping so teams can easily navigate to their relevant metrics.”
Workday worksheets are used not only for analysis but also for release management, documentation, and even as a foundation for robotic process automation (RPA).
Looking ahead, BDO Norway plans to expand its use of Workday functionalities. “In the future, we are also planning to implement Workday Skills Cloud into the performance review,” Kalhagen shared. “The goal is that it will enable us to proactively identify and address future skills gaps.”
Reflecting on the organization’s transformation, Kalhagen highlighted the broader value of Workday beyond technology. “You have regular features and bug fixes, the AI platform that is easy to adapt, and the community for knowledge sharing, training, and support.”
For BDO Norway, it’s this combination of innovation, partnership, and continuous improvement that is helping the firm stay ahead in a fast-moving industry.