I

Ithaka

Nonprofit preserving scholarly materials digitally

Finance Systems & Process Lead

Full-Time
$104k - $130k/yr+ 10% employer retirement contribution
Senior
Remote in USA
RemoteMust work and reside in the continental United States.
IT OperationsEnterprise Applications
No H1B Sponsorship

About the job

Requirements
  • At least 5 years of hands-on experience with ERP, spend management, bill pay, and financial planning systems in an operational or ownership capacity.
  • Direct experience with at least two of Acumatica, Ramp, Adaptive Insights, Vertex, or comparable platforms.
  • A demonstrated track record of initiating and completing process improvements.
  • Ability to influence cross-functional stakeholders and lead organizational change without direct authority.
  • Ability to productively challenge stakeholders and advocate for a better approach, including when it is initially unwelcome.
  • Strong analytical and communication skills, including the ability to build a case, present trade-offs, and influence decisions across levels.
  • Ability to own work end-to-end with limited oversight while keeping leadership appropriately informed.
  • Familiarity with API integrations, workflow automation, or low-code tools such as Power Automate, Zapier, or native ERP automation.
  • Accounting or finance background sufficient to understand how system configurations affect financial reporting.
  • Experience supporting Finance systems implementation or migration projects.
Responsibilities
  • Own configuration, user access, master data, integrations, and operational health across Acumatica, Ramp, Adaptive Insights, Vertex, and other Finance-owned technologies, including future finance systems.
  • Proactively monitor and resolve sync errors, data mismatches, and workflow failures.
  • Maintain system documentation and change logs, manage vendor relationships, and coordinate upgrades and new feature rollouts.
  • Support Finance and Operations staff, triage issues, and address root causes.
  • Evaluate Finance and cross-functional processes for improvement opportunities that reduce manual effort and error risk, and initiate improvements.
  • Partner with Finance and business stakeholders to evaluate current approaches, develop evidence-based alternatives, and recommend improvements.
  • Support improvement recommendations with business justifications to build alignment and prioritize opportunities appropriately.
  • Navigate competing priorities, gain support for recommended priorities, and maintain focus on meaningful business outcomes.
  • Design and implement automation to eliminate manual effort; create high-level workflow solutions and engage technical or functional partners to finalize and build them.
  • Ensure financial systems support audit readiness, internal controls, and data governance standards.
  • Maintain documentation for integrations, configurations, and key workflows; support annual audits and ad hoc reviews.
  • Partner with Finance leadership on system-level controls for expense management, accounts payable and receivable, and tax compliance.
  • Develop business cases that articulate expected value, resource requirements, implementation approach, and success measures to support prioritization and investment decisions.
  • Drive Finance systems projects from problem definition through implementation and adoption, with clear owners, execution needs, and expected timelines.
  • Identify and engage the right stakeholders at the right time.
  • Exercise judgment about when to work through an issue independently and when to escalate.
  • Communicate project status, risks, and trade-offs clearly to Finance leadership, engaging leadership early enough to effect change.
Desired Qualifications
  • Salesforce experience.
  • Experience in a nonprofit, SaaS, or dual-model organization.

About the company

I

Ithaka

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Website

Ithaka Harbors, Inc. is a U.S.-based nonprofit that expands access to knowledge and reshapes higher education through digital tools. Its core offerings include JSTOR, a digital library of scholarly articles and books; Portico, a digital preservation archive that ensures long-term access to scholarly content; and Ithaka S+R, a research and strategy group that advises colleges, libraries, and cultural institutions. JSTOR delivers access to a vast collection and search tools, Portico preserves content for future use, and Ithaka S+R provides studies and guidance to help institutions adapt to changes in education and technology. The goal is to maximize social and educational impact by preserving scholarly materials, broadening access, and supporting higher education to function effectively in a digital era.

Company Size

201-500

Company Stage

N/A

Total Funding

N/A

Headquarters

New York City, New York

Founded

1995

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What believers are saying

  • September 2026 JSTOR AI search rollout already attracts over 15% of users.
  • Path to Open flipped its first 100 books open access in January 2026.
  • July 2026 Digital Stewardship Services landed SCELC and Mellon-backed growth across 100-plus libraries.

What critics are saying

  • ChatGPT and Google AI bypass JSTOR discovery, weakening traffic despite 2026 AI launches.
  • Publisher rights battles over AI training and attribution can block JSTOR's journal expansion.
  • Grant-funded programs and library budgets drive revenue; cuts or contract losses squeeze the whole platform.

What makes Ithaka unique

  • JSTOR spans 14,000 institutions and 1,850 publishers, with Portico preserving scholarly records.
  • ITHAKA combines JSTOR, Portico, and Ithaka S+R, linking content, preservation, and advisory services.
  • Its nonprofit model lets ITHAKA prioritize provenance, access, and preservation over monetization.

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Benefits

  • Health Insurance
  • Dental Insurance
  • Vision Insurance
  • 401(k) Company Match
  • Parental Leave
  • Unlimited Paid Time Off
  • Paid Holidays
  • Paid Sick Leave
  • Wellness Program

Company News

ITHAKA
Sep 23rd, 2026
ITHAKA fall 2026 community letter: AI at JSTOR.

ITHAKA fall 2026 community letter: AI at JSTOR. September 23, 2026 Research is changing. Its mission isn't. Dear friends and colleagues, Artificial intelligence is changing how people discover, evaluate, and engage with scholarly resources. Ithaka see evolution in research and teaching behaviors, not just the tools people use. Researchers and learners increasingly begin with questions rather than keyword searches. They expect conversational exploration, faster orientation to unfamiliar topics, and support as they move between research environments. These changes affect not only where research begins but how people learn to ask questions, evaluate sources, build understanding, and develop original ideas. Ithaka is studying these changes through its work at Ithaka S+R, and Ithaka is actively exploring how best to support shifting behaviors with AI at JSTOR. For decades, JSTOR has helped people discover trusted scholarship, understand scholarly context, benefit from library-supported access, and connect with original sources. As using AI becomes part of the research, teaching, and learning process, grounding the work in those principles becomes even more important. Ithaka is working to help scholarship remain discoverable, attributable, and connected to original sources while supporting the foundational habits of inquiry and source evaluation wherever students and scholars do their work. This means exploring whether carefully governed AI-supported experiences can strengthen the research process while preserving the practices it depends on. Ithaka is taking a two-pronged approach. First, Ithaka continue to invest in responsible and thoughtful use of AI to support users' work on JSTOR. Already, more than 15% of users engage with its AI-enabled research capabilities. This fall, Ithaka is releasing a dynamic new AI-assisted search experience. Ithaka will roll it out slowly across institutions to support feedback and learning. As always, on-platform AI experiences are optional and can be turned on or off by library administrators. Second, Ithaka is looking beyond its platform to other AI-enabled environments that students and scholars are using in their work. People use tools that make their work easier, more convenient, and more insightful. Strengthening research and learning in this context means ensuring that the research experience includes access to trusted, high-quality content with clear provenance that respects copyright holder rights and access entitlements. Ithaka is actively engaged with a small number of companies so Ithaka can begin to explore how best to work together, starting with a focus on academic journals. Ithaka will continue to share lessons and directional insights as its AI experiments evolve. On this point, I invite you to dive deeper into its thinking and work by reviewing two recent publications: AI is changing research behaviors: How JSTOR preserves thinking and learning by JSTOR product leaders Ashank Rai and Beth LaPensee and Postsecondary Value in the Age of AI by Ithaka S+R managing director Martin Kurzweil. Please be in touch - whether you'd like to ask a question, share an idea, or explore opportunities to collaborate. Feel free to reach out to me or your day-to-day ITHAKA contacts. Sincerely, Kevin Guthrie

PR Newswire
Sep 1st, 2026
AWS Public Sector Blog highlights PDFix's role in ITHAKA's on-demand PDF accessibility pipeline.

AWS Public Sector Blog highlights PDFix's role in ITHAKA's on-demand PDF accessibility pipeline. Sep 01, 2026, 10:00 ET AWS Public Sector Blog highlights how PDFix structural tagging helped ITHAKA achieve a reported 98% accessibility check pass rate while reducing remediation costs by more than 97% FREDERICK, Md., Sept. 1, 2026 /PRNewswire/ - PDFix-US today highlighted a new AWS Public Sector Blog article detailing how ITHAKA, the nonprofit organization behind JSTOR, built an on-demand PDF accessibility remediation pipeline on Amazon Web Services (AWS) using PDFix for automated structural tagging. ITHAKA provides researchers, students, and educators access to an extensive collection of scholarly content through platforms that include JSTOR. Its digital corpus encompasses approximately 20 million PDFs and 156 million pages, including materials dating back to 1550. Remediating a collection of this size through conventional manual methods would present a significant financial and operational challenge. According to the AWS article, manual remediation of ITHAKA's full collection could cost between $156 million and $624 million. Rather than attempting to remediate its entire archive in advance, ITHAKA worked with AWS to create an on-demand pipeline that processes documents as users request accessible versions. Each remediated PDF is then stored and made available for subsequent requests, allowing ITHAKA's accessible collection to grow organically based on actual user demand. Within the pipeline, PDFix applies structural tagging - including headings, paragraphs, lists, and tables - to individual PDF pages. Amazon Bedrock generates alternative-text descriptions for images and charts, while AWS Step Functions orchestrates the processing workflow. The completed document is reassembled and evaluated against PDF/UA accessibility requirements using validation tools that include veraPDF. Early Results Reported by AWS * A 98% accessibility check pass rate * An estimated processing cost of $0.026 per page * A cost reduction of more than 97% compared with manual remediation * Production deployment approximately two months after the initial AWS and ITHAKA workshop | "This implementation demonstrates what becomes possible when PDF accessibility is treated as a scalable technology and workflow challenge." - David Herr, President, PDFix-US | ITHAKA combined PDFix with AWS services, artificial intelligence, validation tools, and appropriate human oversight to create a practical solution for an extraordinarily large and diverse document collection. It is an excellent example of how organizations can move beyond an exclusively manual approach and begin addressing accessibility at scale. The architecture also incorporates a human-review fallback for documents that do not satisfy the required accessibility checks through automated processing. This combination of automation, validation, and human intervention allows ITHAKA to direct specialized remediation resources to documents that require them while processing many other documents efficiently. Because the pipeline is modular, ITHAKA was able to adopt PDFix and veraPDF in place of the structural-tagging components used in the original open-source solution without rebuilding the complete architecture. The same modular approach will allow ITHAKA to evaluate and integrate new technologies as PDF accessibility and generative AI capabilities continue to evolve. The AWS article presents the ITHAKA implementation as a replicable model for universities, libraries, government agencies, nonprofits, and other organizations managing large collections of inaccessible or untagged PDFs. It also demonstrates how PDFix can serve as the structural-tagging engine within cloud-based, enterprise, and on-premises document workflows. "Organizations do not have to choose between an unsustainable manual-remediation expense and leaving large document collections inaccessible," Herr added. "PDFix gives developers and organizations the technology to build accessibility directly into scalable document-processing workflows while retaining validation and human review where they are needed." To learn how PDFix can support automated PDF tagging, batch processing, and integrated accessibility workflows, visit PDFix.net or contact PDFix-US to request a demonstration. About PDFix-US PDFix-US LLC is the exclusive U.S. distributor of PDFix software solutions for automated PDF accessibility, remediation, validation, and document-processing workflows. PDFix technology includes desktop applications for accessibility professionals and enterprise users, as well as developer tools that enable organizations to integrate PDF accessibility into cloud, server, desktop, and automated production environments. PDFix solutions help government agencies, educational institutions, corporations, nonprofits, and technology providers address large document collections through scalable automation combined with human verification. David Herr, President PDFix-US LLC Trademark notice: Amazon Web Services, AWS, Amazon Bedrock, AWS Lambda, AWS Step Functions, AWS Fargate, Amazon EventBridge, and Amazon S3 are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc. or its affiliates. JSTOR is a digital platform of ITHAKA. PDFix-US is not representing that AWS or ITHAKA endorses PDFix-US or this announcement. Media Contact David Herr, President PDFix-US LLC SOURCE PDFix-US LLC

ITHAKA
May 21st, 2026
Todd Toler to lead new Ithaka S+R practice area to advance the responsible use of AI in scholarly communications.

Todd Toler to lead new Ithaka S+R practice area to advance the responsible use of AI in scholarly communications. May 21, 2026 Ithaka S+R announced today that Todd Toler will be the inaugural practice lead for a new area of focused work on artificial intelligence in scholarly communication, beginning June 8. AI is rapidly reshaping how knowledge is created, discovered, and disseminated. Across higher education and the research ecosystem, leaders are grappling with how to harness its potential while preserving the core values that make scholarship trustworthy. The new practice area is grounded in a simple but powerful idea: that AI in research and publishing must be "scholar-ready": aligned with expectations for integrity, provenance, rights awareness, and transparency.

AASCU
May 21st, 2026
AASCU and Ithaka S+R announce Rural Student Success Network.

AASCU and Ithaka S+R announce Rural Student Success Network. WASHINGTON, May 21, 2026 - The American Association of State Colleges and Universities (AASCU), in collaboration with Ithaka S+R, today announced the cohort of institutions participating in the Rural Student Success Network. This new national initiative is designed to strengthen student success and economic mobility at rural-serving colleges and universities. Supported by a two-year grant from ECMC Foundation's Rural Impact Initiative, the Rural Student Success Network brings together 17 bachelor's degree-granting, rural-serving institutions committed to improving outcomes for community college transfer students and adult learners, while aligning academic programs with local and regional workforce needs. "Rural-serving institutions are engines of opportunity for students and communities alike," said Lisa Hunter, AASCU's associate vice president for academic innovation and transformation. "Through this network, AASCU and Ithaka S+R are creating a structured space for institutions to learn from one another, strengthen student success strategies, and build capacity to meet the evolving needs of rural learners and regional economies." Over the next two years, participating institutions will engage in peer learning, data-informed self-assessment, and targeted technical assistance. Each will receive a $15,000 subgrant from Ithaka S+R to support participation in convenings, data sharing, and continuous improvement activities. Institutions will also receive customized insights based on institutional, state, and federal data to help guide decision-making and program alignment. The Rural Student Success Network will culminate in a public case study report and summative brief authored by Ithaka S+R, offering actionable lessons and a roadmap for other rural-serving institutions nationwide. 2025-27 Rural Student Success Network Cohort * Athens State University (AL) * California State University, Chico * University of Hawai[[ʻ]]i at Hilo * Montana State University Billings * Chadron State College (NE) * SUNY College of Agriculture and Technology at Cobleskill * SUNY Oneonta * SUNY Oswego * SUNY College at Potsdam * Eastern Oregon University * University of South Carolina Beaufort * South Carolina State University * East Tennessee State University * Jacksonville State University (AL) * University of North Dakota * College of Southern Idaho * Vermont State University Through this collaboration, AASCU and Ithaka S+R aim to amplify effective practices, strengthen institutional capacity, and expand postsecondary opportunities for rural learners across the country. About AASCU The American Association of State Colleges and Universities (AASCU) is a Washington, D.C.-based higher education association that represents the sector of over 500 regional public colleges, universities, and systems whose members share a learning- and teaching-centered culture, a historic commitment to student populations, and a dedication to research and creativity that advances their regions' economic progress and cultural development. These are institutions delivering America's promise. About Ithaka S+R Ithaka S+R provides research and strategic guidance to help the academic and cultural communities serve the public good and navigate economic, demographic, and technological change. Ithaka S+R is part of ITHAKA, a nonprofit with a mission to improve access to knowledge and education for people around the world. American Association of State Colleges and Universities believe education is key to the wellbeing of individuals and society, and American Association of State Colleges and Universities work to make it more effective and affordable.

InfoDocket
Mar 24th, 2026
Ithaka S+R publishes Library Partnership Development Framework.

Ithaka S+R publishes Library Partnership Development Framework. Public and academic libraries often serve the same populations through different institutional structures. In both settings, libraries regularly serve students balancing coursework, jobs, and family responsibilities, as well as community members seeking reliable internet access, workforce resources, or a place to study and connect. These shared audiences and missions create natural opportunities for collaboration across institutions, yet there is limited guidance on how they can work together intentionally and effectively to support their community's basic needs. Today InfoDocket is pleased to announce the publication of the Library Partnership Development Framework, designed to help libraries and other collaborative institutions build, strengthen, and sustain collaborations that support student success and community wellbeing. The framework is the culmination of research conducted through the Maximizing Public-Academic Library Partnerships (PALP) project. Drawing on case studies, a national inventory of library websites, and an in-person, participatory design institute with librarians, project advisors, and community stakeholders, the project explored how collaborations between public and academic libraries develop and evolve, as well as the challenges and opportunities they encounter along the way. [Clip] Building effective partnerships The framework organizes partnership development into three interconnected phases: initiation, implementation, and sustainability. Each phase includes guiding core principles, key stakeholders, and practical questions that partners can use to align their goals, clarify responsibilities, and evaluate progress. Institutions can enter the framework at any point depending on where they are in their partnership, whether they are beginning conversations with potential partners or looking to expand and deepen long-standing relationships. Importantly, the framework is designed to be iterative rather than linear. Partnerships evolve over time, and the framework encourages organizations and libraries to revisit earlier stages, refine their approach, and adapt to changing community needs. This flexibility makes the framework relevant not only for new collaborations, but also for strengthening and expanding existing partnerships. Across its research, one theme emerged clearly: libraries are increasingly acting as connectors within broader ecosystems of education, basic needs services, and community support. This insight applies more broadly as well. When organizations collaborate across institutional boundaries, they can extend their reach, access new resources, and respond more effectively to the full range of needs their communities face. By collaborating with each other and with partners across sectors, libraries and other institutions can extend their reach, increase funding opportunities, and better address the interconnected needs that shape community success and wellbeing. Direct to Complete Blog Post About Gary Price. Gary Price ([email protected]) is a librarian, writer, consultant, and frequent conference speaker based in the Washington D.C. metro area. He earned his MLIS degree from Wayne State University in Detroit. Price has won several awards including the SLA Innovations in Technology Award and Alumnus of the Year from the Wayne St. University Library and Information Science Program. From 2006-2009 he was Director of Online Information Services at Ask.com.