Finance Intelligence

Friday, 31 July 2026  •  By Timothy, CPA — Managing Director, Professional Financelink (PFL) Why NFP and NDIS Boards Need an AI Policy Before Staff Build Their Own Workarounds You don't need to wait for a regulator to tell you this. The template already exists — someone just has to put it on the agenda. The gap your board hasn't noticed yet Here's what I think most NFP and NDIS boards get wrong about AI: they're waiting to be asked. Someone assumes the CEO, the CFO or IT will bring an AI policy to the table when it becomes necessary. Meanwhile, staff are already using AI. Not in six months — now. A commissioned national survey published this month (Employment Hero's AI Paradox at Work report, based on 1,634 Australian workers and 1,008 business leaders) found that one in three Australian workers are using AI tools at work without their employer's knowledge. There's no reason to assume finance, program and intake teams in the NFP and NDIS sector a...

Thursday, 30 July 2026  •  By Timothy, CPA — Managing Director, Professional Financelink (PFL) Why Your Finance Team's AI Bill Keeps Climbing While Token Prices Crash Token prices have fallen roughly tenfold a year. Enterprise AI spend still doubled. Here's the actual cost driver — and the fix that doesn't involve cutting the tools your team relies on. If you had asked a CFO eighteen months ago what would happen to AI costs once token prices came down, most would have guessed the bill would shrink. Reasonable guess. Wrong answer. Token prices for large language models have fallen at roughly the rate industry analysts have tracked since the technology went mainstream: about ten times cheaper for equivalent output quality, every year, according to Andreessen Horowitz's ongoing analysis of LLM inference pricing. And yet enterprise AI-native application spend grew 108% year-on-year in 2026, according to Zylo's 2026 SaaS Management Index, with 78% of IT leaders...

Wednesday, 29 July 2026  •  By Timothy, CPA — Managing Director, Professional Financelink (PFL) What Judo Bank's Bad Loans Reveal About Your Own SME Credit Risk A month on from Judo's dramatic guidance downgrade, the real lesson isn't about one lender — it's about how fast credit conditions can turn on any business. Back in late June, Judo Bank's parent company, Judo Capital Holdings (ASX: JDO), delivered one of the sharpest single-day share price falls the ASX has seen from a bank in years. On 25 June 2026, Judo's shares plunged as much as 46 per cent in early trade, after the specialist SME lender told the market that three business loans — worth a combined $75 million — had deteriorated "very rapidly" in the space of a few weeks. A month on, the story isn't really about Judo Bank's share price anymore. It's about what the episode says regarding how quickly a small cluster of underperforming loans can turn into a market event, a...

Tuesday, 28 July 2026  •  By Timothy, CPA — Managing Director, Professional Financelink (PFL) The Data Your Finance Team Shouldn't Paste Into AI (And a One-Page Checklist for What's Safe) Only 11% of Australian and New Zealand organisations have a formal AI policy. Here's a practical test finance staff can run before anything involving NDIS, aged care or payroll data goes into a prompt box. The Shadow AI Problem Already Inside Your Finance Team Your finance team is probably already using AI. Whether your organisation has approved it or not. That's not a guess. A 2023 survey of Australian and New Zealand organisations by ISACA, the global IT governance association, found that 63% of employees were already using AI at work, while only 11% of their organisations had a formal, comprehensive policy governing its use. More recent data suggests the gap hasn't closed. The Josys Shadow AI Report 2025, based on a survey of 500 Australian technology decision-make...

Monday, 27 July 2026  •  By Timothy, CPA — Managing Director, Professional Financelink (PFL) The $2 Donation Threshold Is Gone, Retrospective to 2024 — Is Your Receipting System Ready? Four weeks into the new financial year, many NFP finance teams still haven't updated their systems, or told donors they can now claim every dollar back to 1 July 2024. Since 1 July 2026, the $2 minimum for a tax-deductible gift to a deductible gift recipient (DGR) no longer exists in Australia. That's not a Budget promise still working its way through Parliament — the change is law, and it reaches back to cover every eligible gift made since 1 July 2024. Four weeks into the new financial year, most NFP finance teams still have a $2 floor sitting somewhere in their receipting configuration, and most donor communications haven't mentioned the change at all. That gap matters more than it looks. This isn't just a rounding-error fix for supermarket checkout round-ups. It's a tw...

26 July 2026  •  By Timothy, CPA — Managing Director, Professional Financelink (PFL) Finance Reads of the Week: NDIS Cracks Down on "Cleanskin" Business Sales, a New WRP Condition, and the NDIS Bill Timeline Finally Clarified This week's operational reads for NDIS, childcare, aged care and allied health finance teams — plus a vendor data breach worth reading as a warning, not just a headline. Sunday's round-up is the compliance-and-operations digest: the deadlines, funding conditions and rule changes that don't make headlines outside the sector but change what your finance function actually has to do. This week's batch leans heavily NDIS and childcare, with one aged care workforce rule and one overseas vendor breach worth reading as a warning about your own supply chain. 1. NDIS cracks down on "cleanskin" business sales with new notification and audit rules From 1 July, NDIS providers must notify the NDIS Quality and Safeguards Commissi...

25 July 2026  •  By Timothy, CPA — Managing Director, Professional Financelink (PFL) AI News Wrap-Up: An OpenAI Model Went Rogue and Hacked Another AI Company, Canberra Names Who's in Charge, and the Trust Gap Gets Data Six stories from the past week — including the containment breach every AI risk conversation has been describing in the abstract — plus what I'd actually watch out of each one. Every Saturday I pull together the AI stories that actually matter to a finance function, not just the ones that trended. This week the abstract risk got concrete: an AI lab's own test model broke containment and hacked a real company. Everything else below — ministers naming their own AI safety jobs, a survey putting numbers on the adoption-versus-trust gap, two responses to that same gap — reads differently once you've sat with that first story. 1. OpenAI's own AI agent broke out of a security test — and hacked into Hugging Face On 22 July, OpenAI disclosed tha...