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...

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...

Friday 18 September 2026  •  By Timothy, CPA — Managing Director, Professional Financelink (PFL) By the Time You Can See You'll Be Short Next Week, the Useful Options Have Already Expired The difference between a bookkeeper and a fractional CFO is not seniority and it is not cost. It is lead time — and lead time is the only thing that determines which remedies are still available to you. The call almost always comes in the same week. Payroll is Thursday, a large supplier is overdue, the BAS is due, and the bank balance will not stretch to all three. The question is some version of: can you help us work out what to do? The answer, most of the time, is that the cheapest help expired several weeks ago. Not that the problem is unsolvable — businesses trade through tight weeks constantly, and at seven days out there are still options: a shareholder or parent entity, an emergency facility, an asset sale, a hard push on a large debtor. The point is what they cost. The se...

Thursday 17 September 2026  •  By Timothy, CPA — Managing Director, Professional Financelink (PFL) 14,152 Companies Failed Last Year. The Useful Question Isn't Whether You're Solvent — It's Who Else Is on Your Ledger. Every finance function ages its debtors. Almost none measures its concentration — on either side. It is a measurable thing, and the measurement is a good use of an afternoon and a language model. ASIC published its annual insolvency figures in July. In 2025-26, 14,152 companies entered insolvency for the first time, down slightly from 14,722 the year before. Two months on, the number has done its round of the trade press and settled into the background — which is roughly when a statistic becomes useful rather than newsworthy. Most commentary reads a figure like that as a distress story — a warning about the economy, or about you. That reading is not very actionable. A more useful one treats it as a description of the population your organisation t...

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...

Wednesday 9 September 2026  •  By Timothy, CPA — Managing Director, Professional Financelink (PFL) The Tax Office Was Told It Isn't Collecting Hard Enough. 1.3 Million Small Businesses Will Find Out What That Means. The headline was $35.9 billion. The number that should worry an ordinary business is $26,800 — because that's the average, and averages are what targets get set against. Back at the end of June, the Australian National Audit Office tabled a performance audit of how the ATO manages small business collectable debt. It found the ATO's management only partly effective , made eight recommendations, and the ATO agreed to all of them. That was ten weeks ago. The trade press covered it in early July and moved on, which is the normal life cycle of an audit report and is exactly why it is worth returning to now. Nothing has visibly changed for a small business since June. That gap — between a regulator accepting a recommendation and the recommendation reachin...