10Alpha Tracker - Tips & Tricks - Webinar #10

Robin 

Welcome to our last webinar of 2023. Apologies if you watched the live version of this webinar. You'll have realized that the webinar stopped a couple of minutes in. We lost all internet to our office, unbelievably. 

Robin 

So this is a recorded version of the webinar, but covering exactly the same material. So you didn't miss out by not joining us today live. This is a recording, not a live one. I feel like one of those people on the TV when they have a quiz and they say, if you're watching it on recording, don't call in because you'll not be counted. 

Robin 

Yes. So welcome again to the webinar. This webinar is about the client portal in Alpha Tracker. I'm Robin. I'm the director here. Kim is Alpha Tracker specialist. 

Kim 

Hi. 

Robin 

We've got Dan and Judy. Now, Dan and Judy are going to keep an eye on us and chip in with any questions. Dan, you have met before. He's team leader at Start. Judy, you might not have seen face-to-face with special guest Judy. 

Robin 

She's come over from Adelaide, Australia. Judy's the director of our sister business, Alpha Tracker, in Australia, who's servicing our Australian and New Zealand clients. So, client portal, what is it? 

Robin 

Do you need to buy it? Do you need to add it into your Alpha Tracker? You don't. If you've got Alpha Tracker, you've got the client portal. The client portal is incorporated in every Alpha Tracker system. 

Robin 

Probably the main use that you'll have had with it is to enable your clients to download PDF copies of reports or view live asbestos registers. But there's a lot more to it than that. It's free in terms of you can add your clients into the client portal and allocate logins and passwords. 

Robin 

You don't have to tell us. It doesn't cost you anything. But you can charge your clients to use the portal if you want to. It's actually a complete management tool for asbestos, for water, for all of the services that Alpha Tracker provides. 

Robin 

So, if you want to charge your clients, that's entirely up to you. We do have clients that do that. Lots of features in there. That reminds me just to say that release 40 of Alpha Tracker is now ready. 

Robin 

You'll be seeing the blogs and the LinkedIn posts and things next week about that. So, keep an eye on release 40 and do ask us if you want us to upgrade or you can upgrade yourself using the option in the menu. 

Robin 

So, back to the client portal. First of all, Kim's going to show some of the features in the water hygiene side of the portal. So, these are the features that your clients will be using if you're performing water hygiene services for them. 

Robin 

Over to you, Kim. 

Kim 

Thank you, Robin. Yes, so if you're a water user, you've got a nice new water dashboard on the client portal. So this is what it will look like. You've got some charts first. You've got all of your sites that are marked as requiring a risk assessment. 

Kim 

We'll have some sort of stats here. So we can see we've got one here that requires a review. We've got two that have been risk assessed and we've got five here that have not yet been risk assessed. And with this data, if we click on, say we click on the two, it then populates the little grid below and we can see the two sites where those risk assessments have taken place. 

Kim 

And you can drill down further and we can see the actual details of those risk assessments. The other chart we've got is to do with remedial actions. These will be showing your categories, whatever they are. 

Kim 

Here we've got, say, five sites that have a category two remedial action. Again, if I click on that, it populates the grid below so you can see which those are. There's more information as well. We've got tabs across the top. 

Kim 

So again, these will just show you all the details relating to your water data. We've got actions. So any of the actions that are there in your data, here they are listed out. You've also got other things like assets. 

Kim 

Here we've got some data with some photographs. There'll be more things if you drill down. Outlets, pretty much the same thing. Previous visits. We've got a list of the appointments, the visits that you've made to these sites. 

Kim 

And planned visits, that's going to be anything that's upcoming. So any visits that you've got planned, then we've got one in there. 

Robin 

And the assets and outlets and actions there on the tabs, Kim, those are for all sites, presumably, not just a specific site. So you're looking across all the, yeah, the whole portfolio. Done any done, Judy, any comments on that, Judy, have you seen that before? 

Judy 

I hadn't seen that before, so it's pretty new for me. The only question I had was the plan visits. How can you see anything that's in that plan visits functionality or tab? 

Kim 

Quite easy. They simply have to be in the diary. 

Judy 

Oh, simple. 

Kim 

Link to all the projects and just be in the diary. 

Robin 

How simple is that? So if there are appointments in the diary, they're gonna show all the plan visits. Lovely, okay, so that's a feature then that you'd see if you, or your clients will see if you're performing water hygiene work for them. 

Robin 

So Legionella risk assessments and monitoring type jobs. The water side of Alpha Tracker, our new module is going really well. We've got lots of clients now using it and lots of clients who are going to be using it or placing orders at the moment. 

Robin 

If you do water hygiene work or you're thinking of getting into water hygiene work, get in touch, we can give you a demo, we can send you some videos, show you how it works. It's really nice, the data capture side all happens through Alpha Tracker Mobile, which is our app in the app stores of course. 

Robin 

And it's sort of been very much tried and tested now. So it's a really nice module fits into Alpha Tracker really well. That's water, let's have a look at asbestos. So this is probably what you're most familiar with with the portal. 

Robin 

So Kim, do you wanna run through some of the asbestos features that people would see? 

Kim 

Sure, so the main screen you'll be using if you're an asbestos user is this site list and compliance summary. So this would list out your sites for you, any of the sites where you've got projects and any of the sites where you're doing some work or planning to do some work. 

Kim 

And from here, you can see these key dates here when you last did a survey, when the last re-inspection was, and these are colour coded. So you've got an indication there whether it's compliant. So it's in date, it's green, amber, and you need to be thinking about doing another re-inspection and red if it's overdue. 

Kim 

So you've got some nice colour coding going on there. And the key way that you would use this really is to see the site registers. So you've got a couple of ways of doing that, click on the underlined name, or you've got a little icon, go into the register. 

Kim 

So this one, this little site register we're opening here with some demo data in it. It's showing you the latest position for this site. So it's across all of the work that you've done, all the surveys and re-inspections that you've done. 

Kim 

The idea is it shows you the latest position and it shows you everything, positives and negatives. You would typically search this or perhaps sort the data. We'll use some of these preset filter buttons that we've got here. 

Kim 

I would often come in, click on the asbestos register button and then it will show me just the positives and the no accesses. The no accesses are red as you can see here. So they're nicely highlighted for you. 

Kim 

You can also generate reports from these registers and you can download the data to Excel, whatever you find most appropriate. Back on this home screen, we've also got a summary of the data. So a quick summary bar chart of the items that are at the different schools, how many you've got. 

Kim 

You've also got the reports. So this will show you those snapshots in time that make up the register data. So these are the projects and your clients can come here and access their reports. So you can see them here, you get a little thumbnail view here and you can download the report for yourself. 

Kim 

Okay, you've also got a notes, better little client notes. This is for your clients to make notes themselves so that they're visible on the portal. So only for clients who've got specific permissions, just a way of having something for them to keep notes visible for themselves. 

Kim 

You've also got the site grid. It's pretty much the same information that's displayed here, just more prominence to the photos, to the maps. You've got more or less the same buttons across the top here so you can access the same sort of information. 

Robin 

I like the site grid. Whenever I do a demo with Alpha Tracker, the sight grid is what people like the view the layout.

Kim 

 I much prefer this.

Kim 

You've also got dashboards, so you've got some charts here, again, looking at your data across all these sites. If you hover, then you can see the values. So on this one, we've got riskless best loss by material score. 

Kim 

I've got two items at very low risk. I can click on there and it will open up a view of the register with just those items listed for me. So it's a nice, easy way to access the data. You can do that on all of those. 

Kim 

We've also got the report list. So this is across all of your sites, all of the reports. You can come in here and search. It's quite an easy way to get to them, but perhaps it's easier to go off each of the sites on the site list. 

Kim 

And you've also got the site map, which is a map view of all your sites. So if they're geolocated, then you can see them on here. You can open up full screen. You can see where the points are. You can zoom in and out. 

Kim 

It just gives you a nice visual of the locations of your sites. 

Robin 

There's a lot of different views there with the same data but you can switch them on and off got you so that people can figure the portal to work how they want it to so that it's not overwhelming for clients logging in so some clients just have one or two dashboards available some have most of them or you can mix and match if you go back to the site list and compliance summary you'll see on there that's showing asbestos in those columns that Kim was waving the mouse at now and water in the next few columns so you need to switch on the water module to see the water columns but you do get a view of all of the services in one place which is which is handy Judy do your clients use this for hazardous materials as well 

Judy 

So if they've got any hazardous materials and they've enabled the hazardous materials client portal next to the little chevron or exclamation mark, there'll be other buttons for them to see their lead paint. 

Judy 

They can have SMF materials, polychloronite bar panels. That word always gets me. 

Robin 

Easy feeders, easy feeders today.

Judy 

 Take it easy. And also ozone depleting substances. So they've got various things that they can see on their client portal and use those functions as well through those buttons that you've got there. 

Robin 

Okay, so we've got asbestos functionality, water functionality, PCBs, lead, ozone depleting materials, all that hazmat stuff. The form side of Alpha Tracker as well, that also is featured in the portal, but there'll be more of that coming in release 41, the next release of Alpha Tracker. 

Robin 

So things like fire risk assessments and other form based activities and the new form designer built into Alpha Tracker that comes in the next release. Thanks, Kim, for that. There's some general features I just wanted to mention before we wrap up. 

Robin 

So on the left hand side in the menu, the menu can be customized, by the way, you've got inquiries and quotes, this is really useful. When you create a quote for your client, they get to see them in the portal if you want them to, and they can accept quotes in the portal. 

Robin 

If they accept one of your quotes, you get a message say they have, so you can then progress it to a job. They can also raise quotes or raise requests for quotes through the portal. So if you're working with somebody on a regular basis, rather than do the whole quote thing by email and phone call, they can just work through the portal and that is very efficient. 

Robin 

We use Alpha Tracker to run our own business, I think a lot of you know that, and that's something that we do a lot with our clients. So we will give client portal access to our customers, our customers being consultancies like yourselves watching this video today. 

Robin 

And then we'll issue a quote, it'll appear in the portal, people will give us the go ahead to make a template change or add a new module to the software all through the Alpha Tracker client portal. So quotes are great. 

Robin 

Project Pipeline was the other one I wanted to mention, I think. Project Pipeline is a view of the work that's going through Alpha Tracker, so your client can track jobs without needing to get in touch. 

Robin 

So you can choose whether you have this feature or not, first off, and if you do have the feature switched on, you can choose which milestones in the job are shown in the pipeline. And as Kim's shown you there, the green ones, the ones that are completed. 

Robin 

It also colour codes, I think, I'm looking at Dan and Judy on this one, I think. Dan, it also colour codes, I think if you overdue the milestones, it colour codes them. 

Kim 

I think it only does that on the other side. 

Robin 

Okay, probably not. Probably not a bad thing. You don't have to wash your dirty underwear. Whatever the expression is. So the port, I think the project pipeline is nice. Again, if you're working with somebody, and you can switch that on client by client for your clients. 

Robin 

So if you're working with somebody, and you've got, you know, we're doing hundreds of domestic surveys, and they're constantly asking for updates, they can just view it through the portal to the project pipeline. 

Robin 

The last thing I mentioned is tickets, actually, you might notice the ticket one right at the top. If you're a customer of ours at the moment, which you likely are because you're watching this webinar, when you call us for support, we raise a ticket, you can see those tickets through the client portal, and see how we're doing with them. 

Robin 

But our clients can now use the ticket feature in their copies of Alpha Tracker. And although you're not probably providing an IT service to your customers, you're providing asbestos and water hygiene services or whatever. 

Robin 

A lot of clients are using this now so that their customers can raise questions about work, queries about reports through tickets. So if you want to switch the ticket feature on, get in touch. Generally, that's switched off by default, by the way. 

Robin 

So anything else, Dan, Judy, I forgot to mention on the general side of the client portal, or is that pretty much it? 

Dan 

I think you've covered most things Robin. The other point that's quite good to mention is we've got a number of standard reports built into the portal as well. So that's under the data extracts option there. 

Dan 

And this can just help your clients extract information looking for, for example, high risk items or things that are requiring management or reinspection, things like that. So that's quite useful as well. 

Dan 

And you can either view those reports on screen or pop them into Excel as well. So we've got a handful of those pre-built in which which can be quite useful too. 

Robin 

Thanks for that. 

Judy 

It'll be good to let people know that there's the two levels of client portal access here. There's the client admin and then there's a straight client portal user and individually each of those users can also be customized so you could have a user that can see all the sites or you can drill down and have one user that can only see a server site and then provide. 

Robin 

That's a good point. 

Judy 

As well for those, you know, if they've got permissions to be able to edit the registers, they can edit the registers online. So you can really... 

Robin 

Oh, that's a really good point. 

Judy 

log in and almost down to a far not to almost to give those those 

Robin 

It was Weird you travelling from Australia just to tell us that, Judy. 

Robin 

I'd forgotten to mention that there's also training features in there and there's also, there's a lot in the portal. Fortunately for you, there's a manual which describes all of this. Now your manual is actually on our website in the manual section, not surprisingly. 

Robin 

So in the manuals section of the alpha-tracker.co.uk website you'll find the client portal manual there ready to view or download. There's a manual built into the portal for your customers to use. 

Robin 

And that can be customized. I know Judy's customized that for a few of her clients. And then you can have a version of the client portal manual that's got your logo in and is customized to say whatever you want it to say. 

Robin 

So let us know again if you want to customize the client portal manual that appears. Only last thing I wanted to say was you can watch all of the recordings of the webinars this year through our website. 

Robin 

And there's a webinar section. Thanks, Kim, if you wanted to bring that up and just scroll down. So this is webinar number 10. You can see here we've got the YouTube videos of all of the webinars that we've done this year. 

Robin 

And you can just watch them back at any time. Do share them with your teams, do share them around. It's great to see some of these videos now have had hundreds and hundreds of views which is surprising but lovely. 

Robin 

So that's great. So that's it. So that's the last webinar of 2023. It's the first time that we've had a disruption with the internet dropping. So it's nice to keep us on our toes. There won't be one in December. 

Robin 

So watch out in 2024 for the new dates, new times. Thanks again for joining us. Thanks again for watching this one. And hope you have a great Christmas. Bye for now. 

Kim 

Bye.