Welcome to the Alpha Tracker Family, Tetra Tech!

We’re delighted to welcome Tetra Tech as the latest UK consultancy to join the Alpha Tracker family.

Tetra Tech is a major technical, engineering and environmental consultancy, with more than 6,000 employees across its UK, Ireland and Netherlands operations and a much wider global presence.

Their UK health, safety and compliance teams have extensive expertise across areas that are particularly close to home for us at Alpha Tracker, including fire safety, asbestos management and legionella/water quality. Their services range from fire risk assessment and fire engineering through to asbestos and legionella consultancy and accredited training.

So, naturally, we’re very pleased that Alpha Tracker will now be supporting the Tetra Tech team in managing this work.

Training Underway

The project has now reached another important milestone, with Tetra Tech completing their first Alpha Tracker training session with Kim from the Start Software team.

Some of the photos from the first training session

As the photos show, it was very much a hands-on session — phones out, screens up and plenty of discussion around how Alpha Tracker will work in practice for the team.

For us, those first training sessions are always an exciting point in a new implementation. The software starts moving from being a project into something people will actually be using every day.

Another Major Consultancy Chooses Alpha Tracker

It’s particularly satisfying to see another multidisciplinary UK consultancy choosing Alpha Tracker to help manage its compliance work.

Alpha Tracker has been developed specifically around the workflows of asbestos, legionella/water hygiene and fire consultancies, bringing surveying, scheduling, field data collection, reporting and management information together in one system.

We’re looking forward to working with the Tetra Tech team as their implementation progresses and seeing Alpha Tracker put to work across another leading UK consultancy.

Welcome aboard, Tetra Tech!

And a big thank you to everyone involved in the first training session — particularly Kim for getting the team off to a great start.

Are you an asbestos lab? We may have new work for you - get in touch

Do you run a UK asbestos laboratory using Alpha Tracker?

We have a new Alpha Tracker asbestos consultancy wanting to connect

We’ve recently welcomed a large UK asbestos consultancy to Alpha Tracker, and they’re looking to connect with asbestos laboratories around the country who also use our software.

They have laboratory analysis work available and are keen to speak to potential lab partners, so this could be a great opportunity to pick up some additional business.

If you’re interested, please get in touch with Zac Marshall at zac.marshall@start-software.com and we’ll be very happy to make an introduction.

It’s always good to see Alpha Tracker customers working together!

Why Your Email Account Is More Valuable Than You Think

We recently listened to an interesting episode of BBC Radio 4’s Scam Secrets – The Power of Your Email – and it’s a useful reminder of just how valuable access to an email account can be to criminals.

The BBC "Scam Secrets" series is full of useful cybersecurity advice

For many of us, email sits at the centre of our digital lives. If someone gains access to your inbox, they may be able to reset passwords for other services, discover where you bank or shop, and learn a surprising amount about your personal and professional life.

The programme highlights some particularly worrying examples. Fraudsters have been known to monitor property transactions, waiting for the right moment to impersonate a solicitor and provide alternative bank details for a house-sale payment. Because they have access to the email account, they can potentially delete messages as well, making their activity much harder to spot.

Passwords Aren’t Enough

One of the key messages from the programme is that we need to move beyond relying solely on passwords.

The UK’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) increasingly recommends stronger authentication methods, and passkeys are becoming an important part of that change. Passkeys are designed to be both easier to use and much harder for criminals to steal or trick you into revealing.

It’s also worth reviewing account recovery options. Traditional security questions such as “What was the name of your first pet?” can often be guessed, researched through social media or discovered from other compromised information.

A Few Minutes Well Spent

It’s worth taking a few minutes to check the security of your most important email accounts:

• Enable multi-factor authentication if you haven’t already.

• Use a passkey where your email provider supports one.

• Review the recovery email addresses and phone numbers associated with your account.

• Remove weak or outdated security questions where possible.

• Check for unfamiliar forwarding rules or login activity.

Email security isn’t simply about protecting your messages. Your inbox can effectively be the master key to many of your other online accounts.

The BBC programme is well worth a listen:

BBC Radio 4 – Scam Secrets: The Power of Your Email
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0030yr5

Beyond the Support Ticket: Using AI to Fix Problems at Their Source

Every month, we publish our Alpha Tracker support statistics as part of our general Support Desk update. We do this because we think customers should be able to see how we're performing — including the months when the figures aren't quite as strong as we'd like.

August was one of those months.

During August, 87.20% of support problems were resolved within our target time, compared with 93.18% in July. Summer holidays inevitably had an impact on the team, although we're pleased that 95.20% of our high-priority problems were still resolved on time.

But this month, we'd like to talk about something a little more interesting than percentages.

What if the best support ticket is one that never needs to be raised?

Over recent months we've been developing our own AI-powered Helpdesk system, and one of the areas we're particularly excited about is its ability to help us look beyond individual support tickets.

Our Root Cause Analysis stats in our new AI-powered Helpdesk system

Resolving a customer's immediate problem is obviously important. But sometimes that ticket is a symptom of something else.

Perhaps several customers have encountered variations of the same issue. Perhaps a process is unnecessarily confusing. Perhaps there's something in Alpha Tracker that could be improved so that the question simply doesn't arise again.

Our new system helps us identify those patterns.

Rather than treating every support request as an isolated event, it can help flag tickets that may warrant a Root Cause Analysis. We can then investigate the underlying issue, decide what needs to change and — importantly — track that work through to completion.

That last part matters.

It's very easy to say "we ought to fix that properly". It's rather more useful to have a system which makes sure somebody actually does.

Turning support into product improvement

Our new Root Cause Analysis dashboard is already giving us a different perspective on the workload coming into the helpdesk.

It currently identifies around 83 support tickets per month as potentially preventable through the root-cause work already under way. We've also recorded 56 problems fixed at source.

That might mean a software change, an improvement to documentation, a change to a process or another permanent resolution.

The goal is simple: don't just answer the question more quickly — remove the reason for somebody having to ask it again.

AI is particularly useful here because of the volume of information involved. Humans are very good at investigating an individual issue, but spotting recurring themes across hundreds of support conversations is exactly the sort of task where AI can provide some additional help.

The decisions remain with our team, of course. The AI helps us find the patterns; our support and development teams decide what they mean and what we should do about them.

August's support figures

For completeness, here are our latest results:

Month	Problems resolved on time	High-priority resolved on time	Problems solved
March	92.67%	97.93%	996
April	93.21%	97.92%	869
May	94.27%	96.07%	803
June	94.43%	98.33%	952
July	93.18%	97.41%	982
August	87.20%	95.20%	742

Across those six months, the team has resolved 5,344 support problems.

August's overall result isn't where we'd like it to be, and we'll be working to bring that back up as the holiday period comes to an end.

At the same time, though, we're increasingly measuring support success in another way too: how many future problems can we prevent?

If our new helpdesk helps us answer today's support ticket faster, that's good.

If it helps make sure tomorrow's support ticket never happens at all, that's even better.

Six ways to use AI with Alpha Tracker

AI is changing the way we use business software.

Until recently, most software worked in a fairly predictable way. You logged in, found the right screen, entered some information, clicked some buttons and ran a report.

AI gives us some completely new possibilities.

What if you could simply ask questions about your Alpha Tracker data?

What if you could build a small app for your business, working alongside Alpha Tracker and connected to your Alpha Tracker data, without employing a development team?

What if an AI agent could take care of some of those repetitive Alpha Tracker admin jobs?

What if AI could check your data and reports before they reached your clients?

These aren't just theoretical ideas. They're things we're already experimenting with and - more importantly - so are you, our wonderful Alpha Tracker users.  You've shared so many of your ideas, prototypes and plans with us - and we're as excited as you!

We've added a new Using AI with Alpha Tracker section to our Integrations page, looking at six ways Alpha Tracker users can start taking advantage of AI.

1. Build your own apps

Tools such as Lovable, Bolt.new and Replit are making it surprisingly easy to build web applications using AI.

This is sometimes called "vibe coding".

Because Alpha Tracker has an API, there's an interesting opportunity here. You can build your own specialist dashboard, internal tool, client application or workflow and connect it securely to the data held in Alpha Tracker.

Alpha Tracker remains your core business system, but you aren't restricted to the screens and tools that we build.

That's a big change.

2. Talk to your data

Alpha Tracker contains an enormous amount of information about your business.

Projects. Quotes. Clients. Sites. Surveyors. Appointments. Turnaround times. Invoices. Results. Reports.

Traditionally, getting answers from that data has involved reports, Excel, Power BI or perhaps a database query.

AI adds another possibility.

Imagine asking:

"Which clients have placed fewer orders with us this year?"

or:

"Which projects have been open for more than 30 days?"

or even:

"Summarise our performance this month and tell me anything unusual."

We believe that the data in Alpha Tracker is your data, and we're looking at ways of making it easier to use safely with modern AI analysis tools.

3. Use our AI tools

We've spent much of 2026 experimenting with AI ourselves.

We've built and demonstrated tools that can analyse photographs, examine information about buildings, extract information from documents and help with report quality control.

Some will remain experiments.

Some ideas won't work as well as we hoped.

And some will become genuinely useful features within Alpha Tracker.

That's exactly how we think AI development should work: experiment quickly, find the things that provide real value and then turn the best ideas into useful tools.

You can see some of our latest experiments on our AI Tools page.

4. Give some work to an AI agent

This is where things get particularly interesting.

An AI agent doesn't just answer questions. With the right permissions, it can actually do things.

For example, an agent connected to Alpha Tracker might be able to:

• add a purchase order number to a quotation

• turn a won quotation into a project

• find outstanding work

• update project information

• find an available surveyor

• book an appointment

• close completed jobs

Instead of learning which screen to use and which buttons to press, you might simply tell your AI agent what you want done.

Naturally, security and control are essential. Agents should only be able to access the information and functions they have been authorised to use, with human approval where appropriate.

Our prototype Tracker Agent product can do all of this and more - and it's ready to demonstrate.

5. Let AI help with QC

Quality control is hugely important to Alpha Tracker users.

Your reputation depends on the quality of the information you collect and the reports you issue.

AI can provide another pair of eyes.

It can potentially look for missing information, inconsistencies, unusual values, contradictory answers and other things that might deserve a closer look.

We see AI-powered QC as a first-pass check, supporting your technical team rather than replacing professional judgement.

If AI can spot an issue before a report reaches your client, that's a very practical use of the technology.

6. What haven't we thought of yet?

This might be the most important one.

We know Alpha Tracker extremely well.

You know your business extremely well.

There will almost certainly be opportunities to use AI that neither of us has considered yet.

Think about the repetitive jobs in your business.

The spreadsheets people keep updating.

The emails somebody has to read.

The information somebody has to copy from one place to another.

The reports somebody has to check.

The questions managers repeatedly ask.

Could AI help?

We're very happy to explore ideas with Alpha Tracker users.

Take a look

We've added all six areas to our Using AI with Alpha Tracker section on the Alpha Tracker Integrations page.

If something sparks an idea, get in touch.

You might already have the next Alpha Tracker AI feature sitting in your business, waiting to be discovered.

There's still time to donate for Cancer Research UK

The Telford team have just received their medal from Cancer Research UK, what a lovely surprise!

We'll put the medal on our (small) trophy shelf!

It was some feat to cycle 300 miles in one day as a group, and you can still how we did it here https://blog.start-software.com/2026/07/we-made-it-300-miles-in-one-day-for.html

If you were thinking of donating to this vital cause, but hadn't got round to it, please do - there's still time.  Click here and follow the instructions, thank you!  https://fundraise.cancerresearchuk.org/page/robins-giving-page-2044