Finance Intelligence

30 June 2026  |  By Timothy, CPA — Managing Director, Professional Financelink (PFL) Tomorrow, Payday Super goes live. After years of consultation, a false start, and finally legislated reality, the most significant change to Australian employer superannuation obligations in over three decades kicks in with the first payroll run of 1 July 2026. If you've been across this for months, today is a final confirmation exercise. If you're reading this and something isn't done yet — stop, read the checklist below, and sort it before the first pay run goes out tomorrow. There is no grace period, no exemption for size, and no soft landing for organisations that treat this like a quarterly habit with a slightly tighter deadline. It isn't. It's a fundamentally different compliance architecture, and the ATO will have near real-time visibility from day one. I've been building internal tools to help track Payday Super obligations across...

29 June 2026  |  By Timothy, CPA — Managing Director, Professional Financelink (PFL) There's a revenue problem sitting inside most residential aged care finance teams right now, and it's not the one everyone's talking about. While the sector has been focused on care minutes compliance and the Support at Home rollout, a quieter financial risk has been building — one that lives in the accommodation pricing ledger and rarely gets the attention it deserves. RAD and DAP management sounds straightforward on paper. Set a room price, publish it on My Aged Care, collect the money. But the operational reality for finance teams is considerably messier — and with the government's new AN-ACC pricing risk assessments now underway, the margin for error has just shrunk considerably. I've seen this play out in practice. The complexity isn't in understanding what a RAD is. It's in managing the ongoing calculations, tracking combination...

28 June 2026  |  By Timothy, CPA — Managing Director, Professional Financelink (PFL) Finance Reads: SCHADS 4.75% Checklist, NDIS Claims Overhaul from July, and the Aged Care Audit You Might Not Know Is Coming Four reads for finance managers in NFP, NDIS, and aged care heading into a busy July — plus the compliance timeline that's easy to miss in the noise around the wage increase. With 1 July landing mid-week this year, there's a reasonable chance some of the changes below haven't made it onto a payroll checklist somewhere that they should have. Here's what I'm watching this week. 📋 Payroll Action Required SCHADS Award 4.75%: What Actually Needs Updating Before You Run Your Next Pay Cycle The 4.75% Fair Work Commission Annual Wage Review increase applies to modern award minimum wages from the first full pay period starting on or after 1 July 2026. For providers covered by the SCHADS Award — which covers most NDIS, home care, and commun...

27 June 2026  |  By Timothy, CPA — Managing Director, Professional Financelink (PFL) Weekly AI News Wrap-Up: SpaceX Acquires Cursor, ChatGPT Loses Its Majority, and the $18 Trillion AI Debt You Haven't Dealt With Five stories that shaped AI this week — including the record-breaking acquisition nobody saw coming, a market share shift three years in the making, and a research report that finance leaders should read carefully. Another week that moved faster than most. Here's what I tracked, what I think it means, and which ones I'd pay attention to if you're running a finance function anywhere near technology investment decisions. 🏆 Deal of the Decade SpaceX Acquires Cursor for $60 Billion On 16 June, SpaceX announced an all-stock acquisition of Anysphere — the four-year-old startup behind Cursor, the AI coding assistant — at a valuation of $60 billion. The deal is widely reported as the largest acquisition of a venture-backed startup ever re...

26 June 2026  |  By Timothy, CPA — Managing Director, Professional Financelink (PFL) "Vibe Coding" Is Over. What Karpathy's New Term Means for Finance Leaders, Not Just Developers. Andrej Karpathy says vibe coding raises the floor — agentic engineering preserves the ceiling. That distinction matters well beyond software teams. A Term Karpathy Himself Has Already Moved Past Andrej Karpathy coined "vibe coding" in early 2025 — the term that, more than any other, captured what it felt like to build software by describing what you wanted and trusting an AI agent to produce it. By mid-2026, he'd already moved on. At a Sequoia-hosted AI event earlier this year, he drew a sharp line between two things people had been treating as the same: vibe coding raises the floor, he said. Agentic engineering preserves the ceiling. I've referenced vibe coding on this blog more than once — it's been a genuinely useful entry point for explaining how ...

25 June 2026  |  By Timothy, CPA — Managing Director, Professional Financelink (PFL) I Cancelled ChatGPT Business. Here's the AI Stack I Actually Run Now. Three tools, not three subscriptions. I cut the most expensive one and I'm not missing it. A Few Days Ago, I Cancelled ChatGPT Business It wasn't a small decision — I'd been on it for a while, and it was genuinely useful. But sitting down to actually total up what I was paying across AI subscriptions, the ChatGPT Business cost stood out as the one doing the least to justify itself relative to everything else in the stack. With Claude already doing most of my heavy writing and analysis work, and Gemini sitting there for free as part of my existing Google Workspace subscription, ChatGPT Business had become the expensive middle option I kept paying for out of habit rather than need. It's also been a genuinely disruptive few weeks for the AI tools market generally, which made it a reasonable mome...

24 June 2026  |  By Timothy, CPA — Managing Director, Professional Financelink (PFL) Retail CFOs Aren't Using AI to Predict the Future. They're Using It to Negotiate Better. KPMG and Inside Retail's 2026 outlook says retail finance leaders are prioritising liquidity, banking relationships, and rolling cashflow — with AI used for governance and negotiation, not forecasting magic. The Retail Finance Brief Nobody Talks About Most of the AI-in-retail coverage I read is about the customer-facing side — personalisation engines, smart search, inventory prediction, autonomous shopping agent stories that make headlines. Less gets written about what's actually changing inside the retail finance function itself. KPMG's Australian Retail Outlook 2026 , produced with Inside Retail, puts it plainly: retail finance leaders are prioritising liquidity, building strong banking relationships, and using rolling cashflow models for flexibility. AI is increasingly u...