Almost every large outflow on your calendar is now fixed by someone else. Super since July. Tax. Payroll. From 1 October, what you can charge a customer for paying you by card. Supplier payments are the exception, and most of us still run them on default terms. This is a table of fifteen finance leaders on that.
Chaired by Joe Pettit, Chief Revenue Officer, B2BE Group. With a finance leader from Visy who has done this and is happy to be questioned on it.
The card reforms take effect on 1 October. Payday Super has been live for a quarter. Both land on the finance calendar, and most of the commentary so far has treated them as headlines rather than as something that moves a specific number in a specific business.
The reforms land on the money coming in more than the money going out, and most commentary has this the wrong way round. If you accept cards from your own customers, the cost of doing so can no longer be passed to them. That is a margin question on the receivables side, and it is the part of 1 October most likely to need attention before the half year.
That is a conversation worth convening. It is also one that is difficult to have anywhere else, because the useful version of it involves comparing notes with people in the same position rather than listening to someone at the front of a room.
The premise we expect the table to land on: super, tax and payroll are fixed by legislation or contract. From 1 October, what a business can charge a customer for paying by card is fixed too. Supplier payment timing is the exception.
The value is in the exchange, so the room is built for it. Peers learn more from each other in two hours than from any platform session.
Breadth across businesses is what makes the discussion, and the benchmark, worth having.
Every delegate speaks inside the first half hour. That is what makes the rest of it a conversation.
Who we are inviting. Enterprise businesses turning over hundreds of millions, Australian owned and multinational, with the supplier volume and payment cycles that make timing a real decision rather than a theoretical one. The table is deliberately mixed by sector, so nobody is sitting opposite a competitor and everybody can be specific.
Worth stating plainly, because most invitations of this kind do not survive contact with the room.
One of the four options is ours. We will tell you which, we will be specific about what it does not solve, and the other three get the same three questions asked of them.
Pricing, commercial terms and anything specific to your suppliers sit outside the discussion by design. Those are better handled one to one over coffee, where they can be answered properly and in context.
Payday Super is not a session in its own right. Everyone in the room has lived a quarter of it, so it opens the morning as the question that gets every delegate talking.
A valid outcome is deciding this is not a priority right now. The morning is built to give you enough to make that call either way.
If the date does not work for you, a nominated colleague is welcome, ideally manager grade or above. Someone who can form a view and take it back internally.
From our side there are four of us in a room of twenty: the chair, a finance leader from Visy and a product manager for anything technical the table raises. Our job is short, useful answers that keep the floor with the delegates.
Breakfast included. Finished by eleven, which we hold to. Full address and arrival details come with your confirmation.
Breakfast included. Finished by eleven, which we hold to. Full address and arrival details come with your confirmation.
Fifteen around the table means we balance the room by role and by business, and we hold to one seat per business with no two competitors in the room. Tell us who you are and we will come back to you either way, within one business day.
If neither date works, say so. We will send you the anonymised summary of what both rooms concluded instead. Thirty finance teams' actual positions is a more useful document than anything we could write on our own.
What we do with your details. The delegate list is shared with the room on the morning. We will call you the week after with the benchmark. That is the only follow-up unless you ask us for more.
The four ways to separate the two dates. What each does to DPO and to the P&L. Where each sits against the alternatives already on the market. No form, it is just the page.