Finance Intelligence

Wednesday 23 September 2026  •  By Timothy, CPA — Managing Director, Professional Financelink (PFL) What a $130,000 Finance Manager Actually Costs an NFP — and the Three Lines That Never Reach the Board Paper First in a series comparing an in-house finance team with a fractional CFO arrangement. This one is just the arithmetic. If you run or govern an organisation somewhere between $2 million and $30 million in revenue, you have had this conversation: we need someone in finance, what will it cost, and the answer comes back as a salary band. The salary band is the visible part — usually somewhere between 70 and 80 per cent of what the role actually costs you. The rest is not hidden in any sinister sense. It is spread across six or seven lines in your accounts, owned by different people, and never added up in one place. Which makes the cost of a finance manager in an Australian NFP one of the few numbers that finance itself rarely calculates properly. So let's do ...

Tuesday 22 September 2026  •  By Timothy, CPA — Managing Director, Professional Financelink (PFL) Write Your Modelling Conventions Somewhere the Model Can Read Them Two of the Excel Copilot features that went generally available in June are control artefacts, not productivity features. They have been sitting there for three months. On 25 June 2026 Microsoft published a piece about Copilot in Excel aimed squarely at finance teams, and with it made a cluster of capabilities generally available across Excel for Web, Windows and Mac: personalisation, workbook rules, pre-built skills, federated data connectors, Plan with Copilot, and Copilot attribution in the Show Changes pane. Most finance teams skimmed it and moved on, and I understand why. It arrived as a feature list. Feature lists are answers to questions nobody asked, and the connector half of that list — CB Insights and other market-data providers, on top of the LSEG and Moody's connectors released in May — is ...

Monday 21 September 2026  •  By Timothy, CPA — Managing Director, Professional Financelink (PFL) The SCHADS Schedule E Increase Now Starts 1 December, Not 1 October. Spend the Extra Ten Weeks Building the List You Don't Have. A percentage applies to a headcount. Almost nobody has the headcount — and the 2027 translation depends on it even more than December does. On 11 September 2026 the Fair Work Commission's Expert Panel issued [2026] FWCFB 232 , finalising the SCHADS Award matter in the gender-based undervaluation priority awards review. It confirms the interim increase of around 15 per cent for employees currently engaged under Schedule E — but moves the start from 1 October 2026 to 1 December 2026. The June decision, [2026] FWCFB 137 , had put 1 October forward as a provisional view. Employer groups argued for later: ABLA for 1 January 2027, the Ai Group for no earlier than 1 July 2027. Their central point was that when aged care home care workers received th...

Sunday 20 September 2026  •  By Timothy, CPA — Managing Director, Professional Financelink (PFL) Finance Reads of the Week: 2,000 Aged Care Beds Cancelled Over 2.55%, and an NDIS Budget Cut That Won't Show Up on the Day It Starts Five reads across aged care, NDIS, tax and childcare — four of them carrying a date inside the next eleven weeks that changes a number in somebody's budget. Every Sunday I pull together the operational and compliance stories that change something for a finance function across our sectors. None of this week's items is breaking news, and I'll be straight about that: they are dated decisions and scheduled changes, which is usually when they become useful rather than newsworthy. What they share is a commencement date close enough to model. 1. 3,600 people are stuck in hospital waiting for aged care. Providers have just cancelled 2,000 beds. Two developments, days apart, pointing in opposite directions. On 4 September the NSW Governme...

Saturday 19 September 2026  •  By Timothy, CPA — Managing Director, Professional Financelink (PFL) AI News Wrap-Up: The People Building the Frontier Asked Everyone to Slow Down — and the Market Took Them Seriously for a Day Five stories: a slowdown call from inside the labs, six more agent incidents disclosed, two product launches that land directly on a small finance team's desk, and a survey that explains why most of it isn't working yet. Every Saturday I pull together the AI stories that matter to a finance function rather than the ones that trend. The question of how fast AI should advance has been argued by regulators, academics and critics for three years without moving anything. This week it was argued by the people setting the pace — and for one trading session, it moved a great deal. 1. Three lab chiefs called for a slower race — and Monday's open was ugly On Saturday 12 September, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an essay titled We Must Pace the ...

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...