About the business
Macintosh Medical is a general practice with four sites and around 50 staff across the Gippsland region in Victoria. Like many regional practices, it serves a broad patient base across multiple locations, which means the operational demands behind the scenes are significant. Rostering, payroll, compliance, and HR all have to run smoothly across sites for the clinical side to function the way it should.
Lachlan France is the business manager and brings a commercial focus to the operations side of the practice. It's a role that sits at the intersection of finance, staffing, and compliance; and one that revealed some opportunities for the business to modernise and become more efficient.
CHALLENGES
Running on disconnected and manual systems
When Lachlan came on board two years ago, it was clear that Macintosh Medical was in a good position to modernise its systems. The practice was running on a mix of paper timesheets, spreadsheets to track award compliance, a rostering app that was “clunky” and kept crashing, and a separate tool again for payroll. For a four-site practice with dozens of employees across multiple awards, that was a lot of moving parts with no single system holding them together.
"The ops were inefficient – there were just a lot of steps involved," said Lachlan.
The rostering tool they used was a constant source of friction. Staff on older phones couldn't download the app, which left team leaders to field complaints and troubleshoot. And because payroll ran separately through Xero, every fortnight Lachlan was bridging two systems that weren't built to talk to each other.
Award compliance was tracked on spreadsheets. The Health Professionals and Support Services Award and the Nurses Award both come with complexity: overtime rules, part-time variations, minimum engagement hours for casuals. When Lachlan joined, he spent over six months working back through the practice's history. He spent time updating contracts, reviewing how overtime was being calculated and making sure classifications were right, and he then kept this data stored in spreadsheets.
When it came to payroll, Lachlan made sure he was always there to manage the pay run because he wasn’t confident the process would be able to handle it without him.
That's one fragile system.
The search for a better product
"We've got to get something better than spreadsheets."
Lachlan knew the practice needed a proper digital solution. It needed to replace the manual timesheets and bring rostering, payroll, and compliance into one place. He started searching online, comparing options and reading through features. His bookkeeper had already flagged Tanda as worth looking at.
The non-negotiables were clear: an employee-facing app that actually worked, and rostering that team leaders could navigate without much training. The integrated payroll turned out to be a meaningful bonus on top; it was something Lachlan hadn't expected to find but certainly wasn't going to turn down. When a business sale created a natural moment to move over cleanly, he took it.
"We came across Tanda, and Tanda seemed to be all-inclusive of what we needed – and many other additional things we're still to tap into."
Up and running in a fortnight
The implementation was scheduled across several sessions with Tanda's team. Lachlan gave himself a hard deadline: the first payroll on the other side of the business sale, and he had a fortnight to hit it. After the first implementation meeting, he put his head down and figured most of it out himself. By the time the second session came around, it was nearly done.
"Tanda is definitely an intuitive product. It made it easy enough to do myself."
Staff adoption was handled the same way. Lachlan gave everyone a fortnight to download the app and get set up, with a simple motivator: be ready for the next payrun. Tanda's app worked on older phones where the previous system hadn't, so there were no compatibility issues. From there, the transition was almost invisible.
"The key difference is the lack of negative feedback, which you only hear from staff when things are going bad."
What's changed with Tanda
The biggest shift has been for Macintosh Medical's team leaders, who are the most hands-on with the system day to day.
Before Tanda, they were managing manual timesheets, chasing staff for their hours, and bridging the gap between the rostering system and the payroll software. Every step was a potential point of error.
Now the whole chain runs through one system. Team leaders approve timesheets as they go, rather than scrambling at the end of the fortnight. Shift changes are quick to make. Staff can request leave, fill in for shifts and view rosters – all through the app.
"Rostering gets done a lot faster. The team leaders can also communicate with staff a lot quicker when they need to. And we don’t have to chase staff for their timesheets anymore."
The onboarding process is another area that's made a visible difference. Previously, new staff required printed forms to be signed, scanned, and filed. Now everything is pushed through Tanda digitally. Staff sign off policies in the app, and it's all stored in the one place. Combined with the positions feature (which lets Lachlan template a role once and apply it across multiple staff) onboarding is faster and more consistent across all four sites.
Award compliance has also moved from a manual exercise to something the system handles in the background. Pay rates auto-fill according to the award. Part-time variations flag correctly. And when July 1 comes around with the annual minimum wage increase, changes can be pushed through at once rather than updated staff member by staff member.
The outcome in numbers
Payroll used to take 15 to 20 hours per fortnight across the team; that included a couple of days to collate manual timesheets, process entries, push everything through two systems, and deal with whatever went wrong in between.
Now it takes five to eight hours. On a good fortnight, it’s done by lunchtime.
"We've saved probably 10 hours or so each payrun. It only takes us 5 to 8 hours now."
That's time that goes back into running the practice. It's also less cognitive load sitting on the people responsible for making payroll happen every two weeks.
Reducing risk and increasing certainty
There's something else that's harder to put a number on.
Lachlan talks about confidence. When you're running four sites, managing staff across multiple awards, and responsible for getting payroll right every fortnight, the stakes of getting it wrong aren't trivial. Before Tanda, a lot of that certainty came from manual checking and from knowing the process well enough that nothing slipped through.
Now the system carries more of that load. Timesheets are validated, award rates auto-fill and the checks happen before the pay run, not after.
"Having the right tool has created confidence around payroll and rostering."
Clinic owners might not be in the day-to-day, but they notice the absence of problems. After all, no news from staff or payroll is its own kind of good news.
Advice to other clinics
At industry conferences, Lachlan hears the same frustrations coming up: rostering is hard, compliance is important but complicated, payroll takes too long. One peer asked Lachlan about the move to Tanda:
"I said, are you doing it? They said, yeah, we think we are. And I said – do it. Make the jump. Get with the times."
To anyone who is thinking that changing systems could be worthwhile, Lachlan says:
"If you're considering the decision, you've probably already made it."
Payroll processing
From 15–20 hours per fortnight to 5–8 hours. Around 10 hours saved per pay cycle.
Compliance
Award interpretation automated under HPSS and Nurses awards. Rate changes pushed through the system, not managed manually.
Onboarding
Paper forms replaced with digital signing. Positions templates applied across four sites, reducing setup time for new staff.
Team leaders
Manual timesheet management removed. Rostering, shift changes, and staff communication handled in one place.
