How Quay Medics automated onboarding, scheduling, and payroll in one tech stack.

David Aboud is the CEO of Quay Health and Quay Medics, a healthcare group focused on acquiring and scaling long-standing service-based businesses. When he acquired Medics Australia (now operating as Quay Medics), the business had 50 casual paramedics and first aid staff out in the field, but the administration was handled entirely via manual phone calls and an Outlook calendar. 

To expand the business and prepare for a seven-year growth plan, David needed to modernise these back-office operations and step away from chasing daily messaging so he could focus on high-level strategy. However, expanding a multi-entity workforce to 150 employees felt nearly impossible while relying on legacy tools that required heavy manual effort.

Tracking field staff through disjointed text messages, emails, and phone calls became an exhaustive administrative hurdle. The operational routine relied entirely on a manual chase and trust routine to track staff across remote event locations, meaning David couldn’t verify real-time attendance or give clients immediate operational clarity. This left management constantly operating on the defensive, chasing down answers just to confirm who was actively on site. 

The high stakes of medical compliance added another heavy layer of responsibility. Paramedics and first aid trainers require constant certification updates, clinical qualifications, and localised labour contract management. Trying to manually track different contracts and compliance rules across dozens of casual staff was an administrative headache. 

“Our staff needs to have qualifications and clinical competencies to be out in the field,” David explains. “Trying to manage that on a spreadsheet across 50 casuals, you’re constantly panicking that someone’s going to slide through the cracks with an expired registration. If you get audited or if something happens on a job, it’s your head on the chopping block.”

This complexity multiplied with every new company David acquired, creating a major disconnect between the roster and final pay. Without an integrated system to link scheduling to payroll, David had no way to automatically catch unapproved timesheets or calculate specialised casual penalty rates. Running a fortnightly pay cycle across multiple separate organisations meant manually tracking down paper receipts for road expenses like ice and parking, typing out line items individually, and trying to keep complex payment tiers separate in his head. 

“I tried to train someone else to do it, and there were so many errors going on,” David admits. “It was a task that I didn’t want to let go of. One of the biggest insecurities as a business owner is that you want to make sure people are paid well, on time, and correctly. But payroll bogged me down at times for six to seven hours.”

To overcome these limitations, Quay Medics integrated their rosters, qualification tracking, and pay structures directly into Deputy. Instead of chasing paper or waiting on phone updates, paramedics simply use the mobile app to check schedules, log hours, and instantly upload photos of field expenses. 

Deputy Payroll

By shifting entirely to Deputy’s native payroll engine, the system now automatically matches mobile timecards against specific award rates and complex field allowances without manual data entry. The impact on David’s fortnightly pay run was immediate. 

“The Deputy team was able to turn my seven-hour task into a one-minute button press. We went from seven hours to a click of a button and no errors whatsoever. It was a game-changer,” David says.

The automation gave David the robust platform needed to handle Australia’s notoriously intricate payroll structure. It provided configuration flexibility to support diverse employment types seamlessly across multiple business entities, even when payment structures departed from standard hourly calculations.

When the team asked David what he did with those seven hours back, he shared how that reclaimed time completely transformed his acquisition strategy, allowing him to absorb a new company’s pay structures and overhead from day one:

“I bought another business, and within a month, they were paying someone a full-time accounts role,” David notes. “She was costing the business $1,500 a week to do payroll and very basic invoicing. Within a month, I replaced that headcount with Deputy. I did Payroll yesterday for all three businesses, clicking a button in each entity.”

The newly acquired business was Vital First Aid, which came with a remarkably complex pay structure that historically demanded expert manual oversight. “With Vital First Aid, we had some of the most complicated payroll setups, David recalls. “We don’t pay trainers by the hour; we pay them a set fee for the work they do. They log on and off, but they get a fixed amount for that course. It needed a full accounts person because they needed to understand the nuances of the business to know what to pay each person. Whereas we’re able to set up those nuances with payroll [rules] and therefore the payroll officer doesn’t have to think.” 

Deputy HR & Compliance 

Beyond saving hours on payroll, keeping compliance data under the same platform eliminated the constant operational stress of managing an active medical workforce. Since certifications, active contracts, and field expenses live right alongside the final payroll stack, the platform automatically cross-references employee data to ensure everything is verified well before payday.

This matters more in medical event work than in most industries: rostering a clinician whose registration has lapsed is a patient-safety and liability risk, not just an administrative error. Keeping credentials — paramedic and first aid certifications, active contracts, and mandatory compliance documents — inside the same platform gives Quay Medics continuous visibility of who is compliant well before anyone is allocated to a client event. 

“Our staff requires specific qualifications, and managing those documents inside Deputy has removed the stress of tracking who is up-to-date; we just get notified if someone lapses,” David explains. “Everything the team already does on their timesheets now flows seamlessly into their payslips as automatic allowances and reimbursements. I literally haven’t had a single person say a negative thing about using Deputy.”

Consolidating these disjointed operations allowed the group to confidently scale from around 50 field staff to a workforce approaching 150 people across its entities without a single administrative hiccup, proving the system’s capacity to easily grow alongside its expansion plan. This operational foundation ultimately gave David the clarity and administrative baseline he needed to look toward the future.

“I’ve got the confidence now that every business owner should adopt a tool like this,” David concludes. “It really does give them the two most important things they can’t buy in business, which are their time and energy they could put into growing their business and running their business better.”