Our product development team is constantly innovating, to build a better Alto software experience.
Every time we've added a new feature, we've notified all our users within Alto itself utilising in product messaging.
However, for a full list of the changes on a monthly basis such as new features, any improvements or product fixes to our software, please see the relevant articles in our 2023 Release Notes section of the Help Centre.
This article includes:
To view a log of the latest new features within Alto:
- Sign in to Alto
- Click the ? icon in the bottom right corner of the screen
- Click Product updates
- A summary list of our Product updates display. Some new feature updates will include links that take you to the relevant page within Alto. Popup messaging and/or guides may then launch to provide you with more information on what's new
Improvements
Removed county auto-population from the address lookup
This improvement went live on 27th February.
County auto-population has been removed from the address lookup in Alto for Contacts and Properties.
County information is no longer officially part of an address (and is not kept up to date by Royal Mail). We've removed it due to multiple instances where the wrong county was being prepopulated from postcodes, i.e. Berkshire vs Oxfordshire.
You can however still enter the County manually if you wish.
Portal Publishing page now supports branches who don't publish to portals
This improvement went live on 13th February.
We have now configured the Portal Publishing page to support branches where they only publish to custom API feeds and don’t have any portals set-up.
Notes filter added to Timeline
This improvement went live on 7th February.
Previously, if you wanted to filter for notes on a record, you had to filter using the Other tab on the Timeline and search through the list.
We have now added the ability to filter notes via the Notes tab on the Timeline.
Icons added to Portal Publishing page
This improvement went live on 6th February.
We have added icons for the relevant portals on the Portal Publishing page to provide some visual indicators to differentiate the portals.
For more information on Uploading a property to the internet, click here
Performance improvements for Property Management Dashboard widgets
This improvement went live on 1st February.
We have introduced performance improvements for 2 of the widgets on the Property Management Dashboard - Monies Held and Works Orders.
Product fixes
Fixing Portal Publishing errors
This product fix went live on 24th February.
We have released fixes to address root causes of errors in the Portal Publishing process. The symptom of these errors meant that you could hit an error page whilst trying to publish to the portals.
These fixes will prevent the process from erroring, resolving data gaps by applying a fallback method and handling unexpected duplications.
Fixing the Santander BACS file
This product fix went live on 24th February.
We have removed unnecessary fields from the header row to ensure the BACS file is accepted by Santander banking, without needing to manually edit the file.
Amended Diary user role description
This product fix went live on 24th February.
We have amended the misleading description for the Diary user role for when a new Alto group is created.
VAT added to charges correctly
This product fix went live on 9th February.
A change was made recently to ensure Apply VAT is ticked if a VAT number is imported for a branch. This highlighted a problem that if this is set BEFORE Property Management is enabled, tables are not populated which means VAT is not added to charges. This has now been corrected.
Fixing the Date Events report
This product fix went live on 3rd February.
We have released a fix for the Date Events report which would previously fail if you had a completed Insurance Date Event.
This has now been fixed to ensure you can generate a report successfully even if you have a completed Insurance Date Event.