Public broadcaster gains real-time financial visibility, faster reporting, and greater transparency as it manages industry change and funding uncertainty.
Nonprofit
As a public media organization operating multiple television and radio stations, WMHT needed faster access to financial information, greater transparency for trustees and stakeholders, and tools to support long-term planning in an uncertain funding environment.
Julie Raskin has been CFO at WMHT for 33 years. In that time she navigated the 2008 financial crisis, COVID, and most recently something that's still unfolding: the loss of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting funding—losing $1.5 to $1.6 million in annual support.
WMHT is the public media organization serving New York's Capital Region—two radio stations, four television streams, educational programming, community outreach. It has been operating since 1953 and Julie intends to keep it that way.
"What I have told our trustees is that WMHT has been around for over 50 years," she says. "And I hope that with my guidance, it will be here for another 50." And with that guidance, WMHT has made it through three major crises in 17 years without a single layoff since the 2008 financial meltdown.
"I am very conservative in my budgeting and my spending practices," Julie says.
That conservatism, combined with real-time financial visibility and the ability to model scenarios quickly, is what has kept the institution and its team intact through conditions that have closed other public broadcasters.
It has also given WMHT's community the confidence to step up when needed—membership is currently $1.2 million ahead of budget for the fiscal year, and $200,000 ahead of the prior year, as donors responded to the loss of federal funding by giving more.
"Time is money," Julie says. "Nonprofits have to be there at the starting point and the finish line in order to actually fulfill our mission."
Before choosing Sage Intacct, Julie ran a formal RFP (request for proposal) process, narrowed it to two finalists, and then did something unusual. She took her whole team on the train from Albany to New York City—around 150 miles, two and a half hours each way—to visit another nonprofit using Sage Intacct in practice.
What they saw settled it. The nonprofit walked them through dashboards, cash receipts, invoices, an accounts payable ledger. And then one member of Julie's team sat down and built a dashboard herself, on the spot, during the visit.
"It was easy," Julie says.
That ease of use—for a finance team that would have to live in the system every day—was the deciding factor. Julie had been using a previous Sage product that required closing every subsidiary ledger before information could flow into the general ledger. Nothing was real time. Moving to Sage Intacct, she says, felt like watching a fire being lit.
"It was really great to suddenly see fire being lit literally when I moved to Sage Intacct."
"I hope that with my guidance, WMHT will be here for another 50 years."
Julie Raskin
VP Finance, WMHT
The practical difference showed up immediately in the close process. Before Sage Intacct, WMHT's legacy system needed staff to close and reconcile individual modules before information flowed into the general ledger—a slow, labor-intensive process that left the team working with information already weeks out of date.
"We were lucky if we could close by the 15th or 16th of every month," Julie says.
Today, within two days of month-end, she is already generating revenue actuals and reviewing forecasts. By the 10th to 12th of the month, reports are complete, commentary written, and coding errors already caught and corrected. In principle, the close could happen within three to four days—external factors create a short lag, but the system itself is no longer the constraint.
"You're not waiting towards the second half of the month to figure out what happened the prior month," she says.
For a nonprofit navigating active funding uncertainty, that speed is more than operational—it's strategic. The ability to identify a shortfall early, model alternatives, and adjust before problems compound is how WMHT maintains stability through disruption.
"I can do forecasting. I can look at prior years. I can mix and match budget and prior year," Julie says. "I can have total transparency in the numbers and the process."
Julie readily admits she could talk about numbers all day. But she has learned that numbers alone don't move trustees and stakeholders—visuals do.
Dashboards were one of the features that initially convinced her Sage Intacct was the right choice, and they remain one of the things she uses most, often up to 90% of the working day.
"I love talking about numbers," she says. "But the important thing is to show it visually because everyone reacts to graphs. They react to pie charts."
At the end of every month, Julie produces pie charts and line graphs featuring revenue streams, actuals versus budget, and actuals versus prior year—all built directly in Sage Intacct. One she uses regularly shows membership performance against budget: a single visual that communicates, in a moment, how the community has responded to the loss of federal funding.
The sandbox environment extends the same principle internally. Before committing a new report format to production, the team plays with it in sandbox first—testing layouts, checking what story the data tells, refining before anything reaches the general ledger.
"Sandbox allows us to play and dream," Julie says.
WMHT's finance team manages more than $9 million in annual revenue with a small group of people—close to 98 years of combined experience between them.
"We may be lean," Julie says, "but we're sort of mean” and then laughs.
What Sage Intacct has done is give that experience room to work on the right things. The clearest example is accounts receivable. Before Sage Intacct, AR needed a full-time position. Process improvements and automation brought it to part-time—and that was before AR Automation.
Three weeks before the interview, WMHT went live with Sage AR Automation. One hour after implementation, three clients had already enrolled and made payments through the portal. Within days, the team was seeing prepayments on invoices dated months in the future—customers going into the portal, seeing what they owed, and paying it ahead of time.
"We are now seeing prepayments on invoices dated June and July," Julie says.
The team even had to ask their implementation partner how to handle prepayments on future-dated invoices—a problem nobody had anticipated needing to solve.
On the accounts payable side, the shift has been equally significant. Over the past two years, approximately 95% of WMHT's payments have moved from checks to ACH—reducing manual processing, accelerating payment cycles, and freeing the team from one of the more time-consuming parts of weekly operations.
"I'm doing happy dances every day with AR automation," Julie says.
For Julie, the point of all of it—the faster close, the dashboards, the AR and AP automation—is what it frees the team to do.
"Instead of doing data entry, we're doing analysis," she says. "And that's so important when you're dealing with scarce resources."
That analysis serves every stakeholder WMHT is accountable to. The user-defined books feature lets the team combine employee salary data with direct project costs to show funders the true total cost of each activity—not just the direct spend, but the full overhead picture. Pure transparency, as Julie puts it, to everyone.
The dividend shows up in an unexpected place. WMHT's auditors now routinely bring their rookie auditors to the engagement—because it's a model of how a well-run finance function looks.
"They come into an organization that is well run and well managed," Julie says. "And you know what? It's because of Sage Intacct."
