Finance Intelligence

Sunday 13 September 2026  •  By Timothy, CPA — Managing Director, Professional Financelink (PFL) Finance Reads of the Week: A Staffing Agency Suspended Over Qualifications That Weren't Real, and an $11 Million Payroll Bill a University Reported on Itself Five reads across aged care, NDIS, payroll, SME and FBT — two about assurance you assumed somebody else was doing, two calendars, and one survey where the tax line is the story. Every Sunday I pull together the operational and compliance stories that change something for a finance function across our sectors. This week the first two items are the same story from opposite ends. One set of organisations found out from a regulator that the qualifications behind their rostered staff were worthless. Another went looking through its own payroll, found nine years of errors, and reported itself. The difference is almost entirely who checked first. 1. Nearly 70% of the aged care qualifications a labour-hire agency's worker...

Thursday 20 August 2026  •  By Timothy, CPA — Managing Director, Professional Financelink (PFL) One Payroll Setting, No Middle Position: What I Learned Building the Fix for Payslip Leave Visibility Showing long service leave to the people who've earned it — and not to those three years into a ten-year wait — turns out to be a setting that doesn't exist. Here's what chasing it taught me. Here is a small problem a lot of finance people will recognise, and that almost nobody writes about because it sounds too minor to matter. In Xero Payroll, whether a leave balance shows on payslips is a property of the leave pay item, not of the employee. The decision is therefore organisation-wide. Turn long service leave on, and every employee sees it — including the person eighteen months into a qualifying period, reading a balance that means nothing to them as an entitlement. Turn it off, and it disappears for everyone, including the staff who have earned it and reasonably w...

16 July 2026  •  By Timothy, CPA — Managing Director, Professional Financelink (PFL) The 1 July Award Wage Reset Just Landed — Here's a Practical AI Check for Payroll Errors Every award rate in the country moved on the same day. Here's a simple, practical workflow for catching the errors that reset creates — before they compound. Every modern award rate in Australia moved on the same date this month, which means every payroll system in the country needed to move with it. Earlier this week I wrote about the Fair Work Ombudsman's case against G8 Education, built on award interpretation gaps that sat undetected for two years. Today's post is the practical companion: a straightforward way to use AI as a first-pass check on your own payroll, right now, while the new rates are still fresh. What Actually Changed on 1 July The Fair Work Commission handed down its 2026 Annual Wage Review decision on 2 June, lifting all modern award minimum rates by 4.75%, effective...

14 July 2026  •  By Timothy, CPA — Managing Director, Professional Financelink (PFL) STP Finalisation Is Due Today. Here's the EOFY Twist Payday Super Just Added Every other year, finalising STP is a formality once the last pay run is done. This year, you're closing last year's books under the old super rules while already running this year's payroll under brand new ones. If you report through Single Touch Payroll, today is the day your finalisation declaration for the 2025–26 financial year is due. On any normal year that's a checklist item. This year it lands in the same week Payday Super went live — which means most finance teams are finalising last year's numbers under the old quarterly super system while their current payroll is already running under a completely different set of rules. Worth pausing on both before you hit submit. What's Actually Due Today A finalisation declaration tells the ATO that your reported STP data for the year is...

7 July 2026  •  By Timothy, CPA — Managing Director, Professional Financelink (PFL) Your RAG-Based AI Just Made Up a Payroll Answer. Here's Why That's Not Rare. A new benchmark puts a number on how often "grounded in your documents" isn't the same as correct — and why that matters for anyone pointing AI at award or super questions. Your AI tool didn't lie to you. It retrieved the wrong document, and told you the answer with exactly the same confidence it would have used if it had retrieved the right one. That distinction matters a lot more than most finance teams realise, and a new benchmark released this year puts a number on how often it happens. The technique is called retrieval-augmented generation, or RAG — it's how most "AI that answers questions from your documents" tools actually work. Instead of relying purely on what the model learned during training, the system searches your own documents at the mome...

23 June 2026  |  By Timothy, CPA — Managing Director, Professional Financelink (PFL) We Built a SuperStream File Converter. Here's the Gap That Made Us Do It. The ATO's free clearing house closes for good on 30 June. Here's the problem we kept seeing in the NDIS and NFP space — and why "buy better payroll software" wasn't always the right answer. Every employer in Australia has to pay superannuation through a SuperStream-compliant channel. For years, the easiest on-ramp for small employers was the ATO's Small Business Superannuation Clearing House (SBSCH) — free, simple, government-run, and good enough that a lot of organisations never had to think about super payment mechanics at all. That free option closes permanently at 11:59pm AEST on 30 June 2026 , the night before Payday Super begins. I've written about the Payday Super transition itself a few times on this blog. This post is about a narrower, more practical problem that kep...

22 June 2026  |  By Timothy, CPA — Managing Director, Professional Financelink (PFL) Two Childcare Wage Changes Land in the Same Pay Cycle. Most Finance Teams Are Only Modelling One. The Worker Retention Payment just got extended to 2028. The Children's Services Award also increases from 30 June. They interact — and that interaction is where the budgeting mistakes happen. Note: The scenarios in this post are based on real experiences — mine and those shared by colleagues across the sector. Details have been modified slightly to protect confidentiality, and I've used a first-person perspective throughout for readability. Good News, Badly Timed On 17 June, the Australian Government confirmed the Worker Retention Payment for early childhood education and care will continue until 30 June 2028 , with Family Day Care and In Home Care services now able to join the program if they engage all educators as employees. For a sector that's spent the past eighteen...