Locata’s first Virtual National User Group was attended by housing and homelessness officers from across the country.

The online meeting was held on the morning of Friday, July 3, allowing participants to join the proceedings from their office or home.

Peter Riley, MD of Locata, kicked it off with a presentation setting out the pipeline of new products and enhancements that are about to be released or are planned.

He outlined a new Enhanced Rent Arrears Management module that will soon be launched.

This will sit alongside two existing enhancements to HPA2 to form a fully functional TA rent accounting system with the ability to bulk manage rent functions.

He also gave details on many other enhancements, including document uploads, repeatable tasks, proof of ID and digital signatures.

He explained the work that has been done by our Development Group, which is made up from representatives from 22 councils. They have discussed and prioritised the next 25 enhancements to Locata systems that are currently being considered.

An interesting Q&A session was followed with a presentation from Sector’s Kate Nash and Luke Hatfield.

Kate updated participants on how we work with Microsoft Azure datacenters in the UK and demonstrated new features in CBL and HPA2, including two-factor authentication for staff accessing the back office.

Luke showed how the Change of Circumstances form that allows pre-populating from previous online applications works.

Locata’s Andy Glaves and Corinne Copeland joined the presenters for another lively round of questions that attendees sent using the chat function in the webinar system.

Many of the questions were covered at the time, but every question was recorded and has now been formally answered.

The whole webinar was recorded and has now been uploaded to YouTube. You can view it here.