Alpha Tracker - Tips & Tricks - Webinar #4

Dan 

Good afternoon, everyone. We can just see some people joining now, so we'll just wait for those to join in and then we'll get started shortly. For those of you that have joined, if you wouldn't mind just popping a message in the Q&A window just to let us know that you can hear and see it's okay. 

Dan 

That would be absolutely fantastic. Kim, can you hear us all okay? 

Kim 

I can hear you absolutely fine but yes I've got no nothing coming up in the Q&A yet. 

Dan 

No problem. Fantastic. Great. Perfect. Yeah, we're getting a few of those. Yeah, brilliant. Thanks very much. Lovely. Perfect. I think we've got everyone joining in now, so we'll get started. So first of all, thanks very much for joining us again for another Alpha Tracker Tuesday tips and tricks webinar. 

Dan 

So today, you've got myself, Dan, we're joined here with Jack, most of you are probably familiar with Jack. And then we've got Kim joined as well. And she'll be helping us out with the Q&A's and various bits and pieces throughout the webinar. 

Dan 

So some of you have already joined these before, those of you that haven't, this is our monthly webinar. And we run it on the last Tuesday of every month at 12:30. And the idea behind these is to just try and show you something new, something that you might not have seen in Alpha Tracker, and just point you in the way of some of the features that we have to offer. 

Dan 

So this week, we're going to be showing you the top 10 features from Release 39. So Release 39 is our latest Alpha Tracker release, and it's quite a big one, to be honest. 

Jack 

It is yeah, it's got about 900 changes in it I think. 

Dan 

It is yeah it's quite a big one so we've picked out our top 10 changes just to show you those and yeah hopefully you like what you see today. As with our other webinars if you've got any questions at all just post them in the Q&A and we'll try and answer those throughout the webinar. 

Dan 

If any of your questions don't get answered don't worry we'll be answering those afterwards we'll drop you over an email with some more details and stuff. So I think that's all of the housekeeping done. 

Dan 

Just one last thing we do keep these to 30 minutes and we're quite strict with that so we don't take up all of your lunch time so we try and keep things moving quite quickly through those and yeah I think that's it so let's get started. 

Dan 

So the first thing I'd like to show you in release 39 is the install Alpha Tracker as an app. So some of you may have seen this already some of you may not and it's a really cool feature so I'm just logged into one of our demo systems at the moment and at the top right in your address bar there's an install option over here so you can actually install Alpha Tracker as an app. 

Dan 

So I'll go ahead and do this and what it will do which just popped over on some of the screen what it will do is install Alpha Tracker as an actual app essentially. So you can see down in my toolbar we've got the Alpha Tracker icon and then this is Alpha Tracker here so you don't have any of your browser options or anything like that and it says its own separate app essentially so you can pin it to your taskbar you can have it on your desktop and it's just an easy way for you to open up Alpha Tracker without needing to go into your browser and type in your details. 

Dan 

You'll still need to log in as normal but yeah it works quite nicely and yeah it's useful just to pop it on your toolbar so you can open it straight away and yeah we found that's quite a nice little feature we've popped in there for you. 

Dan 

So that's the the first one of ten that we've added into release 39. The next one that I'd like to run through is water hygiene. So we've been working really hard on a new water hygiene module available in Alpha Tracker and one of our biggest consultancies has been using it now it's got to be for a few months doesn't it Jack? 

Jack 

Yeah, four or five maybe almost six months. 

Dan 

 Yeah, so they've been using it for quite a while. And yeah, it's a really, really nice feature. So we've got various loads of set of options for you so you can control all of your different asset types and questions and risks and bits and pieces like that. 

Dan 

So it's all data-driven. You can control what's showing in your drop-downs and what questions you're asking, things like that. We've got loads of screens available. So this is just one of them, a water appointment screen. 

Dan 

So you can see when your Legionella jobs have been booked in, have they been completed, how many assets or outlets have been recorded, all that sort of stuff. And the actual data capture behind the water hygiene module is within Alpha Tracker Mobile itself. 

Dan 

So some of you will be familiar with Alpha Tracker Mobile. There's a new bolt in for the Legionella stuff, the water stuff, and you can do all of your data capture in there. And it's important to say that that also works offline as well. 

Dan 

Very similar to your Tracker Mobile. 

Jack 

It's fully offline so same as Tracker Mobile like Dan says you can capture as many assets and outlets as you like and then synchronize them straight into Alpha Tracker when you've got a connection. 

Dan 

Exactly, exactly that. So yeah, it's a really nice module, really nice add-on and like I said, it's been used out in the wild for a good few months now. And yeah, if you're interested in that, if you do Legionella work and you're interested in getting that, do get in touch with us and we can get that sorted for you and switched on. 

Dan 

Yeah, so that's our second feature of the day, the Legionella stuff. So after that, we've got a minor change to quotes. So again, a lot of you will be familiar with quotes and we briefly covered this in some of our past webinars, but what we've actually done is made a change to allow the quotation numbers to be five digits now previously, as you know, or some of you may know, they were limited to four digits. 

Dan 

So it would be, for example, BQ23 and then four digits. And we found quite a few consultancies have actually been going over with four digit quotation number for that year. So we've added an extra digit onto there so you can go up to 99,999 per office. 

Dan 

And yeah, we found that that's now been enough for most people. So that's just one to note when you do upgrade to the latest release, your numbers will go from four digits to five digits in the quotations. 

Dan 

It won't make any difference to you. Your user system is exactly the same as normal. It's just when you do get next number, you'll get a five digit one. And all of the folders and all of your Tracker Filer stuff will just work as normal. 

Dan 

So that's just one feature we wanted to let you know about. So moving on to the next feature, this is quite a big one. And yes, it's a really nice feature, actually, it's definitely helped streamline the process. 

Dan 

So this is invoicing. So we'll go into a bit more detail on the invoicing side things. So we've got a we've got a process in place now for the invoicing. So it helps you structure yourselves. And you can see where things are at at certain stages of your of your invoicing process. 

Dan 

So I've just opened our invoicing dashboard here. And we've essentially got a pipeline going on at the top. So we've got the number of invoices or number of jobs, I should say, that are ready to be invoiced. 

Dan 

So we've got quite a few outstanding on our demo system here. And we've then got the next stage, which is what we're referring to as the draft stage. So this is once you've generated an invoice, but you haven't yet finalized it, you've not yet sent it out. 

Dan 

It's just a draft invoice that you've that you've raised. And you can click on to these stages. And then they'll show all of the invoices in that particular stage or the jobs in that particular stage. 

Dan 

Once you draft the invoice, you're happy with it, it looks all okay, you can then finalize that invoice and lock it. So to do that is really simple, you can just tick these tick boxes down here. And you can take all of them in one go if you want, or if you're just doing a batch of invoices, you can just do a batch of those, again, you've got various search and filter options up at the top. 

Dan 

And then once you're happy with those, and you want to go ahead and lock those down, finalize those, you've got a lock option here. And then you can actually lock all of those invoices. So they can then no longer be changed, they drop into the locked section, and then they will become available over here. 

Dan 

Now, like I said, they can't be changed once they are locked. But if you accidentally do lock one, don't worry, you can unlock them and move them back into the draft stage. We understand sometimes you can make a mistake, lock something, but yeah, you can always get that back and move those back into the draft stage, which is nice. 

Dan 

And then once you've actually finalized those invoices, you've locked them, this is where you can go ahead and export. So we've got an export option here. So again, some of you may have used our invoice export options we've got available. 

Dan 

Also we've got zero, we've got Sage, haven't we Jack? 

Jack 

Yeah, a few Sage ones, Sage 50 and Sage 200. Zero like Dan says, which is a really nice integration actually. I think we've got a basic Excel export as well if you would want to export them just to Excel and pop them into another system. 

Dan 

Exactly. Yeah, fantastic. So we've got all of those previous export options available, but they're all available in this one screen. You don't have to go hunting for them. If you follow the process, you'll just get prompted to do the export when you're at the right stage. 

Dan 

And then finally, once you've exported those, and they're all done, they go into the issued section. And this is where you can see all of the invoices that have been issued. And this is essentially the final stage where hopefully all of your invoices sit. 

Dan 

And once they've been exported over to your accounts package, they'll drop into there. And you can then still email out the PDFs if people request copies of them in the future, for example, things like that. 

Dan 

And then you can view the details of the invoice and see everything in here. So that's the That's the flow of the invoicing changes we've been working on. Go on Kim, you look like you have something to say.

Kim 

Yeah, can I just ask a question there, yeah. On the ready for invoicing, are you raising in individual invoices? Or can you put them together if your client wants them on multiple jobs appearing on one invoice? 

Dan 

That's a great, great question. Thanks, like Kim. So Kim was saying, can we raise invoices individually or can we raise them as a group essentially? So we've added a new setting in so you can choose by client if they want their invoices consolidated or if they want single invoices. 

Dan 

So essentially all this means is if the client wants consolidated invoices, you can batch up a chunk of jobs, saved in 10 jobs for a client in a month, you can batch those 10 jobs up into one invoice and then send out just the individual invoice. 

Dan 

Some clients prefer to have an individual invoice for each job, which would be a single invoice type here. And you can search by these. So you can say, show me the consolidated ones, show me the single client. 

Dan 

So it's easy to work out what invoice and type you need to do for a specific client. So yeah, that's just a setting on the client screen, isn't it Jack? That's right, yeah. 

Jack 

There's just a flag on your client detail screen to set whether or not a client does or does not want consolidated invoices. And if they do, you'll be able to find them on that consolidated list, batch up all their jobs and raise one single invoice for a big group of workers. 

Dan 

Perfect. Yeah, exactly, exactly that. So yeah, we've made quite a few tweaks to the invoicing section. So hopefully you'll agree they're nice and welcome changes. And yeah, because we've got a pipeline going through, it just helps you keep track of everything. 

Dan 

And it's all all in one place. So that's the invoicing side of things. The next few changes I'd like to show you is to do with tickets. So tickets are actually something that we here at Start use ourselves. 

Dan 

And you may be aware of the system that we do use. And it's essentially if one of your clients has raised a problem, you can raise it as a ticket in the system rather than just relying on emails. 

Dan 

And it just helps you track what queries, what problems have been raised, who it's assigned to, details about the tickets. So you can look back in the future, oh, we're getting quite a lot of tickets about X, Y and Z. 

Dan 

How can we address that and improve that process? Or we've had a couple of problems on this, is there something we can do about it? So like I said, we use this ticketing system, we've used it for years. 

Dan 

And this is what we do to manage all of the tickets that are raised for this. So we've now made that available to you guys. So you can have that in your Alpha Tracker systems to then log tickets from your clients. 

Dan 

So we've got an example ticket here. I'm having issues accessing the client portal. Can you help me get logged in? And you can see Jack has raised that one under our fake consultancy, Dane Environmental. 

Dan 

And you can just then log all of those and you can see I've been allocated to that particular ticket. So it's up to me to sort that out for Jack. So yeah, we can enable that for you in your Alpha Trackers to help you log and essentially track tickets that have been raised. 

Dan 

We find this is much better than an email because emails can get lost and you've got a history with all of this. What's really good is you can also upload images onto your ticket. So if they sent a screenshot of a problem, you can upload that. 

Dan 

We've also got priorities. So you can track if it's an urgent ticket or if it's one that's just been raised, but it can be dealt with in a couple of days, for example, all that sort of stuff. And then you can say once you resolved it, what was the cause of the ticket, how you actually solved it. 

Dan 

And what's really nice following on from our webinar last month to do with Tracker Filer. You can also send out Tracker Filer emails to the ticket. So if you received the ticket from an email, you can then forward that onto the document folder and then that'll get stored in there. 

Dan 

So you've got that history of that particular ticket. So we've just got a question here about the tickets. So this one from Derek and he's saying, I don't have tickets on my system. How do I get it activated? 

Dan 

So this is activated on a license key. So we can turn that on for you. So what we need to do, Derek, is get you updated to the latest version, first of all. And then once you've been updated, we can just turn on that setting and then you'll get that ticket system available for you. 

Dan 

So if you just contact the support desk, we can get that scheduled in for you and get you updated and have that new new ticketing system available for you. So hopefully that helps. Yeah, sure. 

Kim 

Dan, do the clients also have a view of the tickets? 

Dan 

They absolutely do. Yes, that's a great point, Kim. So as well as you guys in Alpha Tracker raising these tickets, your clients will be able to see the tickets that they have raised and that's available in the client portal as well. 

Dan 

So I'll come to that shortly on one of our other points. But yeah, great point, Kim. The tickets are available for clients to see in the portal as well for what they have actually raised so they can keep track of open tickets that they've got, that they've got available. 

Dan 

Cool. So that's the ticketing system. And again, yeah, we've been using it for ages and yeah, couldn't live without it to be honest. It's such a useful one once you get used to using that. So the next one on the list, so this is number six of 10. 

Dan 

We've got the book scheduling for diary appointments. So this is essentially a way of you scheduling work for recurring appointments. So things such as contaminated land, emergency lighting, testing, water hygiene jobs, anything that you're doing where you regularly revisit a site to check things out. 

Dan 

So I'll show you how that works. It's a really nice feature. And it just allows you to book in appointments really, really quickly. So I've got a test job set up over here. And what we'll do is go to the financials and planning tab. 

Dan 

And there's a few things you need to set up before you can use this. So we've got a default appointment length. So we're setting these appointments for this contaminated land job to be two hours. We've got a start and end date of when we want to be doing the period of work, so between June and August. 

Dan 

And then you've got a schedule. So do you want to do these weekly, fortnightly, monthly? You get the picture. So you can set your schedule. And then all you need to do is go to your diary appointment screen. 

Dan 

And this essentially shows an overview of all of the appointments for that particular job. So we've got the next three years of appointments. So May, June, July, August, et cetera, et cetera. And you can see we've just got batches in here at the moment because we don't have anything booked in. 

Dan 

What I can do is go to the staff over here. I can pick myself. So I'm booking an appointment for Dan. We can say we want to start these from the 1st of June. And we'll say the start time will be at one o 'clock. 

Dan 

We can then go ahead and create a schedule. And then this will create a schedule and show things down in the list here and depending on the number of appointments. So I've got, I just put one appointment. 

Dan 

We could put 100 appointments and you can create your schedule. You'll see that it creates the next 100 appointments in that weekly schedule, essentially. Once you've done that, you can either confirm each one individually and they'll drop into the into the appointment list over here, or you can tentatively confirm that, or you can do all of them in one go or all of them tentatively. 

Dan 

So this is a really quick way to just book in loads of appointments for recurring work. So we found that that's a nice feature when you're doing lots and lots of diary work and things like that. So because I've got 100 in here, it should go through finding the slots. 

Dan 

And it may take a few moments just to drop those appointments in. And once they've been dropped in, they'll then appear in the appointment list and then show in all of the months. 100 might have been a bit too much for the demo here, so it might take a minute or two to do that, but you get the idea. 

Dan 

That'll drop those in and they'll get added onto there. So that's a really nice feature we've got going on. So moving on, I'm wary of time here, so I'll jump on to the next one. So this is actually a client portal change. 

Dan 

So I'll just bring over my other screen here. So Kim, can you see the client portal shown now? 

Kim 

Yes, that's good. 

Dan 

Perfect, cool, great stuff. So I'm logged into our demo company, Dane Environmental again, and just quickly before we go on to the site stuff that I want to show you, we briefly mentioned you can view the tickets on the portal. 

Dan 

So this is the ticket here that Jack raised. I'm saying that he couldn't get access to the portal, so this might be quite a strange ticket to have available on there because you'd be able to see it, but you can view all of the tickets or your clients can view all of the tickets that they've raised on here as well, so they've got traceability. 

Dan 

But the main feature I want to show you on the portal is actually the site list and compliance summary. So this is something we've had for a while, but we've done lots of optimization on this haven't we, Jack? 

Dan 

We've really focused on speeds to try and get this working nice and quickly and loading much faster, which we think it's made a good impact on there. One thing to just bear in mind, we have changed the criteria very slightly on this, so we're actually showing all of the sites available as long as they are linked up with that. 

Jack 

Yeah, as long as they're for that client, then all sites will now show on the site and compliance summary compared to what it was before where you had to have a project for it and you had to undertake a survey for it to show. So lots of client portal users who were logging in had the requirement of sitting there full site list, regardless of whether or not you'd done the survey. 

Jack 

So now we're facilitating that. If there was a site that you did want to hide, you can still hide them from the portal. You can set a status on the site hidden from portal and then that'll be hidden. 

Jack 

So you've still got some control, but it should be a lot simpler to know whether or not the site's on the portal now. 

Dan 

Absolutely. Yeah, that's it. Perfect. Perfect. Thanks for that Jack. So yeah, that's the the site list on there. So again, yeah, hopefully that'll make a big difference to your clients logging in. The next one we've got to this is eight of 10. 

Dan 

So we're nearly through that through the list is the Google Maps and reports. Now some of you may have seen this. We did have it on a blog post. So some of you might have seen this on the latest news section. 

Dan 

But we can now add Google Maps into your asbestos reports automatically. So this is an example of what it could look like. We do have different views as well. This is the street view, but you can actually show the map in your report. 

Dan 

And yeah, we've had a few people taking that up and getting those added in. So that basically just goes off the longitude and latitude for your site, and it will then print out as a map and drop it in onto your report. 

Jack 

And that's quite customizable as well so it doesn't have to be a satellite map like it is there, it can be more of a terrain map or a standard Google map that you'd usually see inside of Alpha Tracker, with control, the marker colour, the marker type, how big you like the map, all those type of things that are controllable so it can be quite flexible as well. 

Dan 

Yeah, exactly, exactly. Yeah, brilliant, perfect. Thanks for that, Jack. So the next one, this is nine out of 10, so we're nearly through, is an integration with a third-party system. So this is an integration with fast, lean, smart, or sometimes referred to as FLS. 

Dan 

And this is essentially a piece of software that can be used to help optimize diaries. And it's used typically for low-value, high-volume work. So lots of domestic surveys, lots of reoccurring appointments, like we were saying earlier, so your water hygiene, so your contaminated land. 

Dan 

And we've got an integration with FLS. So essentially it can help optimize and plan which appointments should be done at what point in the day. And you can basically send over a bunch of appointments and say, can you optimize these? 

Dan 

They'll get back into Alpha Tracker, all optimized, and then they'll sync through to your Google calendars, your Exchange calendars, all that sort of stuff. So that's a new integration we've added in. 

Dan 

And then finally, the last thing I'd like to show you today is some changes to the standard reports we've got in Alpha Tracker. So let me bring that up on screen. And this is on the standard report section. 

Dan 

So I've just opened up my favourite standard reports. And when you go to view a report, you'll notice this output is slightly different now. So we've improved the cosmetics of this. We've made it look a lot more friendly, a lot easier to read. 

Dan 

And we've added in a few features. So we've got pagination in here. So you don't have to keep scrolling through a big list. You can just jump between pages. We've got searches in there as well. So you can really quickly search through the data that are in the reports. 

Dan 

We've also got options to change how many records per page, all that sort of stuff. And then we've still got the remaining features. So you can sort, you can again sort as you would before. And again, it's just been a whole revamp of that standard report section. 

Jack 

You'll notice it's a lot faster now that it's got pagination. So those big report sets, say you might have where you're reporting on thousands of projects or thousands of sites, those will produce much faster when you wanted to view them on screen now. 

Jack 

So that should appear pretty much straight away. 

Dan 

Absolutely, absolutely. Yeah, like Jack said, we've been trying to do some performance changes throughout. So yeah, this screen should work faster for you, as well as the other performance things we've done in the portal and things like that. 

Dan 

So yeah, there are our top 10 release 39 features that we wanted to share with you today. This webinar is recorded, so you can watch this back at any point or share it with your colleagues if you want to. 

Dan 

So we can send out a recording for that, we'll probably do it in the next few days. But before we wrap up, we've probably got time for a couple of questions. If we've got any, Kim, do we have any questions there? 

Kim 

Yes there's a question here about the tickets. So if you're going to take it in via email, does it also sync on the ticket screen too? I think that's referring to sort of raising new tickets. 

Dan 

So at the moment raising tickets will be done just by going to your ticket section, a new ticket, but that's a great idea Derek about having an option to be able to raise tickets from an email. That's something we can certainly discuss and see what options are. 

Jack 

We are making some further improvements to Tracker Filer soon in terms of breaking things from it being emailed in as well as possibility of adding a Outlook extension. Yeah, that would be good. So yeah, once we've progressed that a bit further, that's something that we'll definitely look at for sure. 

Dan 

Perfect, fantastic, thanks Derek, great question. And I think that brings us to time. That's timed up quite nicely, hasn't it? So yeah, that brings us to our 30 minutes. Like I said, we've got a hard 30 minute stop just to make sure we don't take up too much of your time. 

Dan 

But just wanna say thanks again for everyone joining. Hopefully you found that session useful. Like I said, we'll be recording this and sending out the recordings. You can share it with your colleagues if you need to. 

Dan 

And if you wanna get updated to release 39, just get in touch with us. We'll be able to arrange that and then you can start trying to make most of these new features. So the next webinar will be next month, last Tuesday of the month at half 12. 

Dan 

And we'll send out links and details closer to the time. So thanks, Kim, thanks for joining. Thanks again, Jack, for being here with me and thanks to you all for joining. And we shall speak to you next time. 

Dan 

Thanks very much. 

Jack 

Thanks, guys. 

Dan 

See ya. 

Kim 

Thanks.