Finance Intelligence

Wednesday 30 September 2026  •  By Timothy, CPA — Managing Director, Professional Financelink (PFL) $24 Million Recovered for Disability Support Workers — and the Regulator Mostly Went Looking Rather Than Waiting Fifth in a series on the in-house versus fractional finance function. SCHADS award underpayment risk is rarely one bad pay run. It is the same small error repeating, which is exactly what a single-person payroll function is worst placed to see. The Fair Work Ombudsman published its 2025-26 recoveries on 14 September. The headline was $453 million returned to more than 181,000 workers, a 27 per cent increase on the year before. Underneath it sat a figure that matters more to anyone running a disability or community services provider: $24 million recovered for 10,546 disability support workers , with 53 compliance notices accounting for $8.1 million and three enforceable undertakings signed. The structural point is in how the money was found. In the disabil...

Tuesday 29 September 2026  •  By Timothy, CPA — Managing Director, Professional Financelink (PFL) AI Model Prices Fell Again on 22 September. Your AI Bill Won't Simply Follow the Price List — Here's the Arithmetic A worked example: what one routine finance task actually costs, once you count retries, re-sent context and the long-request cliff. Token price is the input. Cost per accepted output is the number that belongs in your budget. On 22 September, Anthropic released Claude Opus 5.5 at $4 per million input tokens and $20 per million output — about 20 per cent below the model it replaced. The same day, OpenAI released GPT-6 Sol at $2 and $10, half the price of the GPT-5.6 version it replaced, and GPT-6 Luna at 10 cents and 50 cents. All prices here are in US dollars per million tokens. I am not going to relitigate whether cheaper tokens make AI cheaper; we made that point in Saturday's wrap and I would rather not repeat it. What that argument almost never in...

Monday 28 September 2026  •  By Timothy, CPA — Managing Director, Professional Financelink (PFL) Three Cents Under the Cap in June: The Latest CCS Data Is Squeezing Both Childcare Revenue Levers — Here's How to Test Yours Fewer children used approved care in every state while centre numbers grew, and by June the average centre-based fee sat three cents below the subsidy cap. The cap has since reset, but an FY27 budget built on "a bit more occupancy or a bit more fee" now needs testing against your own numbers, not the sector's. A childcare centre has two revenue levers. Fill more places, or charge more per hour. Almost every FY27 budget I have seen in this sector leans on one or the other, and usually a little of both. The June quarter 2026 Child Care Subsidy data, reported on 23 September, says both levers are tightening across the sector at the same time. That is worth ten minutes of your board's time this week, because the arithmetic that follows c...

27 September 2026  •  By Timothy, CPA — Managing Director, Professional Financelink (PFL) Finance Reads of the Week: Two Support at Home Changes Land on 1 October, the NDIS Records Duty Is Now Law, and Thriving Kids Starts in Four Days Five operational and compliance reads for aged care, NDIS, childcare and SME finance teams — including two separate funding mechanisms hitting the same date that need two separate lines in your model. This week's round-up is unusually date-driven: four of the five items turn on 1 October, which is Thursday. If you run an aged care or paediatric therapy service, this is the week modelling assumptions get tested rather than discussed. Start with the first item — it changes your debtors ledger without changing your service price, and that combination tends to get missed. 1. From Thursday, personal care under Support at Home stops being something clients contribute to at all From 1 October 2026, all personal care services on the Suppor...

26 September 2026  •  By Timothy, CPA — Managing Director, Professional Financelink (PFL) AI News Wrap-Up: Two Labs Cut Prices on the Same Day, the Frontier Labs Move to Regulate Themselves, and Google Disclosed a Sandbox Escape Only When Asked Five AI stories from the past week that actually touch a finance function — a price war, a self-appointed regulator, an identity problem nobody has solved, and a disclosure gap worth noting. Every Saturday I pull the AI stories that change something for a finance function. This week's two biggest commercial items landed on Monday within hours of each other; almost everything else is about who is supposed to be watching. Read the agent-identity item first — it's the problem your own controls hit next. 1. Anthropic and OpenAI both cut price and latency on the same day On Monday 22 September, Anthropic released Claude Opus 5.5 — which Anthropic says performs at the level of its own Fable 5.1 on most tasks — at US$4 per millio...

Friday 25 September 2026  •  By Timothy, CPA — Managing Director, Professional Financelink (PFL) The Accounting Shortage Is Concentrated in Exactly the Layer You Were Planning to Automate Senior finance people are not recruited. They are produced — by doing the work that is first in line to be automated away. Research released in mid-September by Oxford Economics Australia, commissioned by Chartered Accountants Australia and New Zealand, projects that Australia will be short 17,900 accounting, audit and finance professionals by 2035. The number will get quoted a lot over the next few weeks, and on its own it does not tell you anything you can act on. A shortage in ten years is the sort of finding that produces a nod in a board meeting and nothing else. The composition is a different matter. Read the breakdown and there is an argument in it that is genuinely uncomfortable, and that I have not seen made anywhere else. Where the 17,900 sits The projected shortf...

Thursday 24 September 2026  •  By Timothy, CPA — Managing Director, Professional Financelink (PFL) Somebody Has Shipped an "Agentic CFO". Read the Product Scope as a Map of What the Market Thinks Your Job Decomposes Into. Not a review. A sorting exercise you can run on any of these products, and one worth running on your own function. On 10 September a US startup relaunched itself around an AI agent it describes as a chief financial officer for founders and owner-operators. It connects to a company's financial systems, maintains a live model of the business, and — this is the part that distinguishes it from a chatbot — monitors continuously and raises things unprompted rather than waiting to be asked. I am not going to review it. I have not used it, it is built for US venture-backed startups rather than Australian care providers, and by the time this argument matters the specific company may not exist. Product reviews age badly and this blog is not the place ...