Finance Intelligence

Monday 19 October 2026  •  By Timothy, CPA — Managing Director, Professional Financelink (PFL) StewartBrown's FY26 Home Care Numbers: Net Admin Cost Up About 60% Per Client, and Roughly a Quarter of Package Funding Unused StewartBrown's FY26 survey landed last week. The home care result isn't in the direct care line — it's in the two numbers either side of it, and only one is a pricing problem you must wait on government to fix. StewartBrown released its FY26 Aged Care Financial Performance Survey at its Finance Forum on 14 October. Most coverage went to residential care, where the numbers are genuinely alarming. I want to spend this post on the home care numbers instead, because this is the first full-year survey to include Support at Home — eight of FY26's twelve months ran under the program, which began on 1 November 2025 — and because two of them are the kind of figure a finance lead can act on before Christmas. The survey covers approximately 90,00...

Sunday 18 October 2026  •  By Timothy, CPA — Managing Director, Professional Financelink (PFL) Finance Reads: An Operator Shelved 760 Aged Care Places Because They No Longer Clear Its Investment Threshold Five operational reads from the week — a funding gap showing up as a capital decision rather than a margin, eleven childcare centres closing on about two days' notice while fifty-three others find buyers, invoices sixty days late at twice last year's rate, a fraud charge six and a half years after the first alleged invoice, and a new service agreement template worth reading as a revenue document. Monday's post looked at what a care minute is now worth in funding, and what it costs to deliver. This week the gap between aged care funding and aged care costs turned up somewhere else entirely — not in an operating result, but in a decision to stop building. 1. Opal HealthCare put 760 places on hold, and said the developments don't meet the investment threshol...

Monday 12 October 2026  •  By Timothy, CPA — Managing Director, Professional Financelink (PFL) The Sector Beat Its Care Minutes Target. One Home in Three Didn't — and for Metro Homes, That Sets This Quarter's Funding The care minutes dashboard for April to June 2026 covers the first quarter of care delivered after supplement payments began — and under the department's six-month rule, it is the quarter that prices October to December. The Department of Health, Disability and Ageing's care minutes dashboard for April to June 2026 opens with a reassuring pair of numbers. Residential aged care homes delivered an average of 221.24 care minutes per resident per day against an average target of 216.84. Registered nurse minutes came in at 48.29 against a target of 44.20. On average, the sector is compliant with more than four minutes to spare. Averages are where finance people get into trouble. Of the 2,536 homes that reported, 1,682 met both targets. That is 66.32...

Sunday 11 October 2026  •  By Timothy, CPA — Managing Director, Professional Financelink (PFL) Finance Reads: Fewer Companies Failed Last Financial Year, and the Bigger Ones Were More Likely to Keep Trading Five operational reads from the week — ASIC's latest insolvency numbers and what they say about scale, a 64-centre childcare operator being sold out of administration, an NDIS regulator leaning harder on informal action, and the NDIS line item that could decide whether a protected support stays protected. Start with ASIC, where the same pressure produced different outcomes depending on how big the company was — and the gap is measurable. 1. ASIC's insolvency numbers improved — and smaller companies were still more likely to go straight to liquidation ASIC published Issue 41 of its Corporate Insolvency Update on 1 October. In FY2025-26, 14,153 companies entered external administration for the first time, down 4% from 14,722. The insolvency rate eased to 0.38% ...

Monday 5 October 2026  •  By Timothy, CPA — Managing Director, Professional Financelink (PFL) Full Beds, Thin Margins: Occupancy Alone Is No Longer the Lever in Residential Aged Care Occupancy rose to 95.2% and the share of homes losing money rose to 62%. When your best operational number improves and your result gets worse, the question stops being "how do we fill beds" and becomes "which line moved, and by how much". Two numbers in the same survey moved in opposite directions, and that is the whole story. StewartBrown's aged care financial performance survey for the nine months to 31 March 2026, released in late July, covered 1,173 residential aged care homes — roughly 96,000 beds, a substantial share of the sector. Over that period, occupancy rose to 95.2%, up from 94.2% a year earlier. Over the same period, the proportion of homes recording an operating loss rose to 62%, up from 49%. If occupancy alone still drove the result, that would be har...

4 October 2026  •  By Timothy, CPA — Managing Director, Professional Financelink (PFL) Finance Reads of the Week: $2.83 Billion Cut From NDIS Plans at Reassessment, and Category Cuts Began on Thursday Four operational and compliance reads for NDIS, aged care and SME finance teams — including a reassessment trend that may now matter more to an FY27 forecast than the price schedule. Three of this week's four items are NDIS or aged care. Read the first closely even if you think you know the story: the reassessment numbers are now large enough, and moving fast enough in one direction, that a revenue forecast built off historical plan values may be modelling a mix that no longer holds. 1. $2.83 billion cut from reassessed NDIS plans — and the mix of outcomes is shifting fast NDIA data reported by the ABC on 30 September shows $2.83 billion cut from participant plans reduced at reassessment between 1 July 2024 and 31 March 2026, against $11.11 billion added to plans th...