Finance Intelligence

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...

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...

Wednesday 16 September 2026  •  By Timothy, CPA — Managing Director, Professional Financelink (PFL) Two Aged Care Financial Deadlines Land in Seven Weeks — and the Year You're Reporting On Ran Under Two Different Acts After four years of submitting Quarterly Financial Reports, the form feels like a known quantity. Parts of it are not, and the Act contains no power to grant you an extension while you work that out. Registered aged care providers have two fixed dates in front of them. The Aged Care Financial Report for a standard 30 June year end is due on 31 October, with an audited general purpose financial report attached. The first Quarterly Financial Report of 2026-27, covering July to September, is due on 4 November. Both dates are legislated, and the Department is explicit that no extensions are available. Neither date is new. What has changed is what sits underneath them — and the change landed in the middle of the year being reported on rather than at its b...

Tuesday 15 September 2026  •  By Timothy, CPA — Managing Director, Professional Financelink (PFL) Yesterday, an AI Function Inside Excel Stopped Working. If It Was in One of Your Workbooks, You Now Have a Broken Cell. A small event with a durable lesson: a vendor's AI call does not belong inside a formula that a reported number depends on. Microsoft retired Excel's =COPILOT() worksheet function on 14 September 2026, as set out in Microsoft 365 Message Center notice MC1454373 on 14 August. It shipped in August 2025, reached users through the Insider and Frontier preview programs, and never made it to general availability — Microsoft had it slated for 2027 and then updated its roadmap to say it would not proceed. Excel's AI capability continues through the Copilot side pane; what has gone is the ability to call it from inside a cell. If that sentence means nothing to you, this post is still worth five minutes, because the interesting part is not the function. It...