How WWE unlocked $1.2 million in 3 months with Raftel Strategy

Ariel Menche

Dec 22, 2025

4 min read

Updated: Jul 20

$1.2M

Saved

+73%

FP&A capacity

82 hrs

Saved per month

The short version

Raftel Strategy found $1.2 million in misclassified accruals at WWE within 3 months.
The monthly close for travel expenses dropped from 15 days to 4, which gave the finance team back 82 hours a month.
FP&A capacity for value-add work rose 73%.
The fix: a standardized expense report for every business unit, and accruals based on actual expenses instead of forecasts.

Overview

Founded in 1980, World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) is an iconic American professional wrestling promotion and global media and entertainment company.

In 2022, WWE reported $1.3 billion in revenue and had approximately 800 employees.

Background

WWE’s Chief Brand Officer Stephanie McMahon wanted to streamline financial operations and save costs without breaking the bank

Before we arrived, WWE’s finance team spent most of their time on manual administrative tasks like invoice management and statement reconciliation. They were frustrated by how much of their time was bogged down by these activities, leaving no time for strategic analysis.

Despite their efforts to generate regular financial reports, FP&A was ignored by other departments. Teams like Marketing and PR didn’t even read the reports, saying they were useless or, worse, inaccurate.

We noticed this pervasive problem, and suggested that we partner with WWE to rebuild this broken relationship between FP&A and other parts of the organization.

"We used to waste so much time with manual finance processes. Ariel brought us a huge amount of systems-building expertise. Working with him has been an incredible win for us."

Our solution

Since Raftel Strategy specializes in unlocking the full potential of FP&A to become a strategic partner for organizations, we hit the ground running from day one. Since then, WWE has benefited from the Raftel Strategy solution in two major ways.

1. Opening lines of communication to catch misclassified expenses

Streamlined reporting saves time and money, but in big companies, departments often work separately and don’t share financial data well. WWE faced this challenge, lacking open channels of communication between FP&A, business units and accounting. That’s where Raftel Strategy could help.

Each department managed its own spending and did not share their expense tracking with finance and accounting. As a result, the accounting team had to guess based on prior forecasts and make accruals without real-time data.

In one case, they assumed teams were spending $50k monthly based on old plans. FP&A treated these accruals as real expenses, not knowing the money wasn’t really being spent, marking budget as “used” as they hopelessly waited for invoices to arrive.

As soon as we revealed this problem and other similar mistakes, we saved $1.2 million off the balance sheet.

Moving forward, we transformed the accrual policy to increase account accuracy. Instead of basing accruals on forecasts, business operators began to inform accounting of actual expenses, paid and not.

Raftel Strategy specializes in cultivating channels of open communication and transparency in companies, automating manual tasks and empowering FP&A teams to get the numbers they need to help management make strategic decisions that drive growth.

2. One standardized expense report for every business unit

Efficient systems are critical for companies to streamline expense reporting and avoid wasting time. But many companies have separate functions that fail to update the FP&A team with important information, leaving them in the dark. This can get companies into trouble.

For WWE, managing travel expenses posed a serious challenge. They manually reported expenses using outdated lists of employee roles from 2010, causing travel expenses to be attached to the wrong teams. Fixing this problem with manual checking required 15 full days each month.

“Why don’t we have any travel budget left?” the Head of PR asked us once. “It’s only February and we haven’t gone anywhere.”

Since Raftel Strategy specializes in streamlining financial reporting, we created a user-friendly standardized expense report for all business units, achieving three outcomes:

1. Output for accountants: It told accountants exactly what was “spent” and “expensed” every month, making the accruals accurate.

2. Operator budget management: It put the responsibility of budget-management on operators, what they wanted in the first place, transforming the FP&A role from time-wasting middleman to strategic advisor.

3. Output for operators: It let operators map and manage their own budgets, seeing what they already spent vs. how much remained for the year. This was the first time operators used these reports.

As a result of this process, the monthly close time for travel expenses dropped from 15 days to 4. That returned 82 hours a month to the FP&A team and raised its capacity for value-add work by 73%. For an average FP&A manager making $150,000 per year, that time is worth more than $76,000 annually.

Impact

WWE establishes sustainable user-friendly systems for financial efficiencies, saving costs and unlocking time for value-add activities

$1.2M

Saved

+73%

FP&A capacity

82 hrs

Saved per month

Partnering with Raftel Strategy not only saved WWE costs and unlocked value in the short-term, it opened lines of communication between accounting, FP&A and business units to ensure streamlined reporting in the future.

Looking ahead, WWE highlights Raftel Strategy’s strategic lens and ability to devise comprehensive solutions to complex problems. They enjoyed working with Raftel Strategy and appreciated our diligence and patience in working with various stakeholders to implement new systems to improve efficiency across the company.

WWE’s $1.2 million was sitting in misclassified accruals the whole time. If your accruals are built on forecasts instead of actuals, or your close eats weeks of every month, we can give you a straight read on what to fix. Get in touch.