Not sure I understand your question, but I'll try to answer...

Not sure I understand your question, but I'll try to answer anyway.

A quarter year is a very short period of time in terms of a company's earnings cycle (its a mere 60-odd working days) and receipts from customers or payments to suppliers that fall either side of the last day of a quarter can have significant impacts on the relationship between quarterly accounting earnings and cash flows.

But over longer time frames, e.g., a full financial year, the two metrics should converge, more or less.

For example, in DH23, the company reported NPAT of $788k and Free Cash Flow of $320k; in MQ24, NPAT was $412k, while Free Cash Flow was higher, at $620k. then in JQ24, NPAT came in at $0.5m, with Free Cash Flow -$400k.

So Reported NPAT of $1.7m for FY2024 is around $1.2m higher than Free Cash Flow of $0.5m; this means that when the full set of financial statements are released, we should be able to see an increase in Working Capital of around $1.2m (between JH23 and DH23 balance dates, an increase of $0.9m had already occurred).

Point being that Cash Flows and NPAT will almost never match exactly over given any financial period, especially not short-term ones such as quarterly, and the difference will be attributed mostly to changes in Working Capital (along with some other smaller items, such as capitalisation of certain expenditure or changes in provisions, but these are usually not very material).