Finance Intelligence

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 ...

Saturday 31 October 2026  •  By Timothy, CPA — Managing Director, Professional Financelink (PFL) AI News Wrap-Up: Analysts Followed an AI Agent's Hidden Lean 86% of the Time. Only an Estimated 40% of AI-Quoted Statistics Traced Back to a Matching Study. Five stories from the week of 24–30 October — an experiment on how far experts defer to an AI agent, a study of where AI-quoted numbers really come from, a cloud AI service that mixed up customers' responses, a big API price cut with a caveat in the safety report, and a new Google model released to cyber defenders first. Most weeks the AI news is about what the tools can do. This week's more useful stories were about us: how often we take an AI's view without noticing, and how often the numbers it hands us survive a second look. For a finance function, that is the review step, and the review step is ours to keep. 1. Professional analysts went with an AI agent's hidden lean 86% of the time Anthropic...

Friday 30 October 2026  •  By Timothy, CPA — Managing Director, Professional Financelink (PFL) Fractional CFO vs Full-Time CFO: The Honest Signs You've Outgrown Us and Should Hire In-House We've spent six posts on where a fractional model works. This one is about where it doesn't, the middle path between the two, and how a good fractional CFO should help you make the move. Over the past two months, this series has made the case for fractional finance leadership. We've covered what an in-house finance manager really costs , the lead time problem , and most recently who should do which half of the finance job . All of that stands. But if you only ever hear one side of an argument from someone who sells that side, you should be suspicious. So here's the other side, as honestly as I can put it. There is a point where a fractional CFO stops being the right answer. Spotting it early is good for you, and frankly good for us too. A client we've outgrown and...

Thursday 29 October 2026  •  By Timothy, CPA — Managing Director, Professional Financelink (PFL) The AI Companies Are Still Spending More Than They Earn, and Introductory Prices Are Starting to End. Use the Cheap Window to Grow Yourself, Not Just Your Output. Why today's AI prices probably aren't permanent, how I'm using them to learn things I couldn't have learned this fast before, and a simple 30-day plan if you haven't started. Here's a fact that doesn't get enough attention: the AI tools most of us now use every day are, for the companies building them, still very expensive to provide. Leaked audited figures reported in June put OpenAI's 2025 operating loss at about US$20.9 billion on revenue of about US$13.1 billion. Its net loss was larger again because of a one-off accounting entry. Anthropic reportedly told investors this month that it made an adjusted profit last quarter, on a measure that leaves out some costs and hasn't been p...