Name: How Alto keeps multi-branch agencies in control
Uploaded: 2026-09-18T11:46:15.604Z
Duration: 29 min 11 s
Description: How Alto keeps multi-branch agencies in control

Transcript for "How Alto keeps multi-branch agencies in control": Hi, everyone. We're just gonna give everyone a minute or so to join. But while you wait, please do introduce yourself. Let us know where you're tuning in from in the chat, which is on the right of your screen. Make sure you also check out the features that we've got available, so you can ask any questions in the q and a. If you've got initial questions or throughout the session, and even if we don't get a chance to answer them, we can follow-up with you after the session as well. We've also got some resources for you. So in the docs tab, you'll find some useful links, you'll find some customer case studies, and a few other tools as well for you to use. There's also a big one as well. So to the top right of your screen, we've got a, request your demo button. So if you did want a bit of a more sort of personalized conversation or a deep dive into Alto, you've also got that option as well for you. Great. So with that covered, I think let's get started. So welcome, and thanks for joining. And today's session is gonna be all about how Alto supports multi branch businesses. And so as The UK's number one estate agency CRM, we've helped many large agencies like Cheffins save hundreds of hours, automate their compliance, and get the visibility that they need across their branches. So today, I'm joined by JD. So he's our resident Alto expert, and he'll be giving you a top level overview of how the Alto platform can help you rethink the same results. So, JD, over to you. Hi. Thanks, Vic, and welcome everybody. What we often hear is, as people are looking to to come to Alto Software, is that their their agency is growing, but their visibility isn't growing with it, or it's becoming, like, harder to understand what's happening across their their businesses. For many multi branch agencies, the information exists, but it's spread across different systems. Branch reports often then go into spreadsheets, directors receive one view, branch managers work from another view, and operational teams are awfully manually bringing everything together to show that visibility across the whole company and the departments. So the value of a multi branch platform is not simply that every branch can log in to one system. It gives the right people the right tools to understand how the business is performing. It gives individuals the right access to different parts of the system. And where I'm gonna start with today is around visibility and how that structure carries through into property management, into permissions, and into things like company configuration and reporting. So as I log in to Alto Software here, what I'm presented with is a is a dashboard. And my focus here at the moment is around the marketing side of the platform, appraisals that we're trying to win, viewings that we're trying to book, offers that we're trying to follow-up and get agreed and move into a sales progression or a let in progression, as well as the inquiries. And where our tech becomes extremely powerful is that visibility aspect. And what I'm looking at at the moment is my whole company. Everything that's happening across my business, all the outstanding appraisals that need to be followed up, and who is taking action of those, and where are they in that journey from appraisal that needs confirming to those that we've valued that we need to follow-up, any, again, any letters or communication to those that we need to chase. And, again, seeing all of those tasks across the entirety of the business. But what we can do within our tool is we can then start to segregate that data. And rather than looking at this company director view, I can start to break that down into different departments. So my sales manager here can start to filter this dashboard and see what's happening within his branch. So this might be, as an example, my Brentwood sales branch, and all of a sudden, I can see that my appraisal numbers have dropped. And these are the appraisal numbers that my team needs to be working on, need to be following up and winning the instructions. And then the same for viewings, what viewings remain to be confirmed, and what ones need feedback on them as well. And this is where we can start to bring automation into Alto Software as well. How can it automate that feedback request and flow that back into the system? And, again, who's visually seeing that? Is it company director level? Is it branch manager level? Or even if I'm a negotiator that works within my Brentwood sales department, I might wanna see just the tasks that I'm focusing on. As I do that, obviously, I'm an extremely proficient negotiator. All of my tasks are completely up to date and on top of all of them. But you're starting to see how we are managing those different views across those different teams and giving us the visibility that we need from that company to that branch to that department to that individual. And if we move ourselves back to all negotiators in that branch and maybe we look at a a different department, again, we can track outstanding tasks and actions as well as website inquiries and mail shots, even then filtering down to that branch for things like our progressions. What rental progressions we're dealing with and move ins? What sales progressions we're dealing with? And, again, what's the progress across that progression? As well as what's all the documentation that we've got outstanding? Contracts that are waiting to be signed to take the property to market. Again, company level, branch level, individual negotiator, down to APTs that remain outstanding on what's been completed. So complete visibility from negotiator to department to branch to company. And this doesn't just stop at the marketing side of Alto Software. This starts to then also flow through into our property management views as well. So let's ensure that our lettings branches are as compliant as they possibly can be. So I might want to combine now all of my letting departments as I'm the regional director and start analyzing what outstanding gas safeties, EPCs, what rent reviews have we currently got that are in flight across the branches and the teams that I'm managing. And if I'm a branch manager again, I might want to filter that down purely to to my branch and, again, the compliance that we are managing and maintaining. And when it comes to compliance here, you can decide the levels of ownership. Who can actually visually see this? Who can click into it, action it, complete it? Or where do we bring in things like a Alto Software AI into these workflows? Removing removing that heavy admin burden and pushing that off to automation. But, again, we've complete control of our team, our branch managers, and our company directors. And this doesn't just stop at compliance. This will work its way into things like then our client accounting. So we can start to see the arrears that we've got, the rents that are due. We can see the landlords we need to pay for that department. Again, the new move ins that we have, vacates. And if we deal with any commercial leases, again, any of the renewals or, again, the rent reviews that we're working on. And it will still carry on filtering right the way down into them, things like our works orders. What maintenance exists, whether it's a a branch level, whether it's a multi department level, or whether this is a a company level as well, even down to where your branches might have property managers that look after certain portfolios or areas, and we can filter right down to the the property manager as well. So we can see that James here, obviously, has a large amount of arrears to chase. He's got a number of move ins that he's working towards. We're varying progress across them through to then different elements of compliance he needs to go and renew down to then the works orders that he is working on. So what you're starting to to see here is that Alto Software handles not only just multi company, multi branch, multi segregation of data, but within that, it can also house multiple branding. So if you've got your company department as well as a fine and country or an exclusive holding branch, all of that will flow through the system. A really good example would be if I went into my properties here and I started looking at memory close, I can start looking at what branch and what department this relates to, and this is my finding country branch. So any mail shots or any documentation that I produce is gonna flow through onto that relevant branding. So all your branding can be controlled across your companies, your departments, and your branches, ensuring that your key vendors and landlords are always receiving the right information from the right team, the right branding, and the right telephony model. I'm about going into lots of detail around customization and configuration. In here, I start looking at things like my email templates. I can start controlling again what branch departments do they belong to, right down to my letters as well and the branch, the brand, the event that they drive against, even down to how do each of my individual branches start to operate. So I can choose things like, do we follow-up? What automations exist within this singular branch? And tailor it either at an organizational level or a department or a branch level as well. So what we're starting to see is how Alto works across large scale agencies. It will work and align as you grow. The system will grow with you. And, of course, it works across sales, lettings, marketing, property management, and client accounting, which means you can then control the permissions of what people do. Who has access to these branches? As a negotiator, I might come in and just see the department or the branch that I work in and the team that I work within. As a divisional manager, I might have access just to the branches within my division. And as a company director, I might have full visibility across the entire business. And this will start to, again, represent its way through as we go into things like our properties. As I start looking at everything that's available for me, my whole for sale list, am I seeing the whole company availability list? We've currently got 68 properties. Or am I starting to break this down into my different branches and departments? And can I see that? Do you, as a company or director, cross sell properties, share contacts, refer, cross branch? And if you do, Alto will allow you to do that. So as I start looking at this property and I start looking at everybody that matches this property, this should show me everyone that's looking within my area for a property like this, but may have also been registered by another branch. Or actually, is this list streamlining purely to just my branch as well? Again, and you can create those permissions, those controls, and those sensitive responsibilities. So this supports good governance without hiding the information that people genuinely need. The aim is not to lock everything down here. It's to give every person the right level of visit visibility and authority for their role. Alto Software also supports your teams, again, through integrations, bringing in those other key property partners you work with. And in order to automate those into auto. One system of record, but also one system of execution. This becomes the place I work from. So if I want to go in and carry out a AML check, I can do that seamlessly through the auto product. I can come in. I can generate my terms of business, again, on the right documentation with the right branding, but I also can carry out things like my AMLs and automate automate those through the platform. As I do so, I can then choose the level of AML, proof of ownership, source of funds, and then two clicks, one to get in, one to action. And off that goes. And every piece of information and correspondence is flowing back into the property record, into the timeline. We can see who did it, what branch they relate to, what task they completed, and where that task currently lives, giving you that connected platform, cross sales, lettings, proxy management, and client accounting. Cross branch visibility, cross branch functionality. Often the question we get asked by agents as well lives around client accounting. And, again, the visibility is in the controls that sit in place here. So what you might have is a central person that manages your client accounts, which allows them, as an example, to control, like, into my account in here, things like multiple client accounts. So if you're a multi branch agency and you're making ongoing acquisitions, not only will you inherit the stock, which is amazing, and the managed tenses, but you might also inherit their client accounts. And, again, Alto Software allows you to house multiple client accounts and decide what properties, what landlords they're linked through, what rents, expenses, and payouts flow for each of those client accounts. But more importantly, who have the visibility and the access to come into here and control it. So as the head of client accounting, I have the role to come into accounts. I have the role to come into import receipts. And what I might want to do is bring in today's rents. As I do so, I can choose what rents I want to bring in, and then get in two clicks, I can instantly pull those transactions direct from that client account. All those payments now allocate to the appropriate tenants. But as a property manager, I don't have access into accounts. I don't have the ability to go and pull transactions and bring rents in. But what I do have as a property manager is the visibility to go into transactions and view things like the account balance to be able to see the previous transactions that flowed through this tenancy and the ability to resend documentation. So let's go and look at the account's data, and if the tenant wants us to resend their invoice, I have the ability whether that's to create it and view it or click to create and send. And off that goes. Invoices is recent. So, again, you're controlling who can action, who can see what parts. Again, as client accounts, I can come in, I can credit rent off, I can control the charges, the receipts, I can issue refunds, I can move money between accounts, I can go to a landlord, and in that landlord, I have the avail availability to add, edit bank details, control things like overseas tax and making tax digital. But as a property manager, again, I might be restricted by that. I can see it, but I can't action it. And your sales staff, you might completely remove visibility. If I was a sales team member, I click into transactions. I'm actually I don't see that tab to even click into it. So it comes back to those permissions and those controls. Where this really supports your agency will then be in things like reporting data and analytics. So if I head into my reports on my analytics tab, you can now start to build out analytical dashboards and reports. And what this will start to surface is things like performance. Let's look at our month on month and year tracker. And, again, let's break this down to whether it be sales, lettings, applicants. At the moment, I'm looking at the entirety of the company. How many appraisals have we won within that period? What do my trends and growth lines look like? Are we trending in the right direction? How does that compare against the previous year? Or even I might open up multiple years to, again, understand the trends and how my market is changing and evolving. And that's great at company director level. Where do we need to focus our performance? Where do we need to focus things like our advertising? Where are my leads coming from? What are my applicants registering for versus the properties that we are taking to market? Do those align? But where we can get really details is then breaking that down at branch level. Well, actually, let's look at a particular branch or a particular department and understand the trends there. So we now know what we need to do at company level, but then how does that start to change and alter the individual branches? How do we change the message or the narrative to the right cohort? And more importantly, we might also look at how our staff are even performing. So we might wanna look at things like our vetting's performance and then drill that by, again, negotiator, proxy manager, and understand, again, our conversion rate. So I can see that by department, appraisals to instructions, well, really performing well at the right 92%. Wouldn't we all love that? If I start to break that down into different branches of departments, how does that change? What does that look like for lettings versus sales? That's even better again. And how does that then look for for certain individuals? Let's break that down for a a cohort or a portfolio. Let's break that down to a particular staff member. Again, giving us the visibility we need so we can take the relevant actions that are required. And you can see that we've built for you already all of these dashboards that's gonna track things like your performance, year on year, your lettings, your sales pipelines, your compliance that's due. It doesn't also look ahead. It looks back and it reflects. It shows you what you've done previously and what the trends look like moving forward. So you can forecast. You can ensure that the right team members are not only trained, but are working in the right departments in the right areas. And if what we would call these out of the box reports are enough for you, we've really simplified it by how you can get greater insight to your business, your branches, your departments, and your negotiators. And before I go and show you that, all of this is controlled through your permissions. Who has access to what data, what dashboards, what reports, what analytics? Who has no access, who can read only, who can read and write, who can delete, who can create charges, refunds, process rents, connect with banks, add bank details. And a way to simplify all of this data to really understand what's going in my business, I just simply ask Alto Software a question. Alto Software, tell me how my branches are performing. Give me a year on year comparison. Show me where we're winning instructions and the negotiators that are achieving the best possible fees. As I do that, I take that natural language and I ask our TOW a question. And what that do does is it then provides me back the results. It shows me those key metrics I asked for. It shows me how my branches were performing, gives me the insight in the data. And I can start to customize this and add in more fields, more insight, more information. I can create these as live boards and live dashboards, and I can save and share this information with team members. But it will start to go even deeper than that, showing me again branches that are achieving the best fees, why that performance is happening. It will start to show me my pipeline and my analytics. It will break down for me commission, sales cycles, individual performance. So, again, I might want to start combining my highest value up, James, with possibly my lowest value up, which is Ben, utilizing his skills to educate other team members. So Alto Software is a end to end platform for sales, vetting, property management, compliance, giving your teams complete visibility over the data that is key to them. So it's one connected view of your business, visibility matched to responsibility, control without unnecessary restriction, and connected through from sales, lettings, property management to client accounting with operational workflows that flow from company level to branch level to individual. It's a platform that reflects your structure. Back to you, Nick. Great. Thank you so much. And every time I see how easy Alto is to use, it's just so impressive. Amazing. So we've got around time for about two questions that we've been sent across, so let's get straight into that. So here's one. We're currently using different systems across our branches. How easy is that switch over to Alto? Sure. So, yeah, we've migrated over 2,000 agencies over the last couple of years. So we have a really comprehensive migration process. And across those two years and, obviously, this goes beyond, but let's talk about, like I said, the most recent data insight. That's been across 50 different CRMs. So when we talk about migration, we understand your business and the structure, first off. What does that look like for you in terms of how do you want to see those dashboards? How do you want to segregate your data? How do you want to have your staff members action certain items to be able to go and visualize and change data? But more importantly, if I go back to that migration, what we then have is detail detailed migration documents. And I'm just gonna drag this across actually, Vic, and let's let's bring this to life for you. Of course, he says as I can then go and refine the window that you happen to be in, isn't it, which is always a challenge in itself when we're doing live webinars. So if I just screen share for you, what you can see here is we can check we can start to talk through how much the data we can migrate, what manual input would be required in terms of that particular provider doesn't provide us the insight for that. But then we then break that down and show you exactly what information is is migrated. So we we customize this to you. So to summarize, we are able to migrate from multiple CRM systems as you can see from here, even from bespoke systems and from spreadsheets. And then from that, we match that data into Alto Software, and then what we do with you is we then validate that data to ensure that you understand what's migrated, where that lives, and you can then feedback to us, for an example, if that data needs to live in a different field or a different box. You may have used your CRM, maybe not as intended, and manipulated the field. We work with you to understand where that batch should go. Right. Amazing. Definitely something that always props up as, you know, people don't always have the cleanest data, but but we're here to sort of, you know, work with you to to help that be as smooth as possible. That's great. And so another question I think it's worth us covering actually is what's the ongoing support like once once they're alive with Alto Software? So yeah. I mean, really great. It's it's brilliant that we can obviously migrate the data across. But without support and and education and support in your teams to adopt, again, the workflows, the visibility to customize that system in line with how you want to operate, all becomes redundant. So we have, obviously, a support team that is now in house. It's in house. It's all UK based with UK support agents who have an average fifteen year tenure within our company and our industry. Those support staff understand the workflows and different nuances of of a state agency. They understand the compliance and the regulation changes that have been affecting our industry even more so over the last couple of years and how our product has evolved with those compliance changes and regulation changes to ensure that you are always making use of all of the system, adopting every single part of the platform. Again and all of those those support tickets can be tracked by you so you have complete visibility of tickets that have been raised by your teams and your departments. There is live chat available and phone support as well as an ongoing help center that can help educate you and inform you of, again, new product releases and any changes that have incurred. And outside of that, it doesn't just stop at support, ticketing, phone support, and help centers. It also feeds itself into things like digital education. Yep. Digital education platforms where your team can go in. If they're taking on a new role or their new start up, they can self learn, can teach themselves how to add properties, manage client accounts, manage contacts, mass mail audiences, right down to then ongoing webinars with latest releases and best practice guides, even then down into things like one to one training support, whether that be via Zoom or whether that be on-site sessions. So the platform grows with you, but we are also there to support your growth, industry change, your new starters, and role changes within your organization. Amazing. Great. And, yeah, we're we're really excited to have support back in house. So, yeah, all great things there. Amazing. Well, we're just about at time now, so thank you so much, JD, for sharing all of that amazing knowledge. As I mentioned at the beginning, this is very much just a snapshot of what Alto Software can do for you. There is so much more that we can explore, and it's it's definitely worth just clicking that button at the top, requesting that demo. You can meet with either JD and or someone else on the team and just really get into detail about what your agency needs, and how we can support you. So there's lots lots more to explore. Thank you so much everyone for joining. I hope you have an amazing rest of the day, and hopefully, we'll speak to you soon. Thank you. Thank you. Bye bye.