Finance Intelligence

Wednesday 4 November 2026  •  By Timothy, CPA — Managing Director, Professional Financelink (PFL) Your Bookkeeper Isn't Your CFO. So Who Is? If a small business or NFP has a bookkeeper and nobody above them, the CFO job hasn't disappeared. It has quietly landed on the CEO. Here is an honest self-check for whether you are ready to carry it, and what to do if you're not. "We need a better bookkeeper." It is one of the most common things I hear from CEOs of growing organisations. The numbers arrived late. The cash position surprised everyone. The cost centre report doesn't match how the business actually runs. The frustration is real. The diagnosis is usually wrong. In many of those situations the bookkeeper did exactly what a bookkeeper is employed to do: process transactions, reconcile accounts, run the pay, prepare the BAS. What went wrong sat above that work: the design, the judgement, the controls and the forward view. Those were never give...

Tuesday 3 November 2026  •  By Timothy, CPA — Managing Director, Professional Financelink (PFL) I Tried to Fully Automate Cash Flow Reporting More Than Once. Here's Where I Settled. A rule-based helper now assembles the weekly cash view from the bank reconciliation in minutes. It still doesn't produce a report anyone should act on until someone senior has reviewed it. Here's why I stopped chasing full automation, and where the line sits. For a client's weekly cash flow, I've built a helper that reads the accounting system's bank reconciliation export, sorts every transaction into cash flow categories by rule, carries forward last week's manual corrections, and produces a draft cash view with a list of everything it couldn't place. What used to be a couple of hours of copying, sorting and cross-checking is now a few minutes of running a script and opening a workbook. And I've given up, for now, on making it fully automatic. Not for la...

Monday 2 November 2026  •  By Timothy, CPA — Managing Director, Professional Financelink (PFL) 153 Misconduct Reports Against the Big Four. Your Auditor Probably Isn't One of Them. Ask These Five Questions Anyway. ASIC's latest figures on the big four accounting firms are a reminder that audit quality isn't something a board can assume. For a mid-sized NFP or SME, the useful response isn't alarm. It's a better conversation with your own auditor. ASIC's count of reports of misconduct relating to the big four accounting firms has risen to 153, according to figures reported by Accounting Times last week. That's up from the 139 ASIC chair Sarah Court told a parliamentary committee about on 4 September. The figures cover 1 July 2023 to 7 October 2026. By firm, KPMG accounted for 53, Deloitte 47, PwC 42 and EY 18. Some cases involve more than one firm, so those don't add to the total. Separately, ASIC is reviewing more than 550 internal complaint...

Sunday 1 November 2026  •  By Timothy, CPA — Managing Director, Professional Financelink (PFL) Finance Reads: Home Care Approvals Rose 16% Last Quarter. New Starts Fell 26%. Budget on the Second Number. Four operational reads from the week of 24–30 October — the gap between approval and care in Support at Home, nearly $1.3 billion of aged care funding left unspent across two reporting periods, a residential provider leaving the sector every week, and the pay point check behind a $5.36 million disability sector back-payment. Three of this week's reads come from aged care, and they tell one story from three angles. Money is approved, allocated and budgeted, and much of it doesn't turn into care, or into provider revenue, on the timetable everyone assumed. The fourth read is a payroll lesson the disability and aged care sectors share. 1. Support at Home: more people approved, fewer people starting care The Support at Home program data report for April to June 2026 ...