Organize Spaces

Facility is the lab's physical plant: the rooms, the freezers, the shelves and boxes inside them, and the instruments people book time on. Set it up once and every sample and every reagent can point at a real place, so finding something stops being a question you ask a colleague.

Facility belongs to the team rather than to one project. A freezer is a physical object in a room, so every project in the lab stores things in the same one. You'll find it under Operations in the sidebar, and it opens without picking a project first.

Creating a Location

New location shows the kinds of location Conspecta knows about, grouped by what they are:

Pick one and you're asked for a name plus whatever that type needs. A freezer asks its temperature, an incubator asks temperature, CO₂, and humidity, and an instrument asks what kind it is. Anything that holds things also asks how you want to track them:

• Shelves only adds named shelves and assigns samples and materials to them. Simple, fast, and right for most labs.
• Shelves + boxes with position grids adds boxes with numbered grids on top, so you track exactly which position a sample sits in. Worth the extra structure for a biobank or a shared core facility.

Parent location, description, and icon are set afterwards on the profile. The type is the one thing you can't change later, since the fields and behavior hang off it.

Locations nest the way the physical world does: rooms in buildings, equipment in rooms, shelves and drawers in equipment, boxes on shelves. Conspecta refuses combinations that make no sense, so you can't put a building inside a freezer.

Biology Department          (building)
  └─ Room 204               (room)
       ├─ Freezer −80°C     (freezer)
       │    ├─ Shelf 1      (shelf)
       │    │    └─ Sample Box A1   (box)
       │    └─ Shelf 2
       ├─ Fridge 4°C        (fridge)
       ├─ Confocal A        (instrument)
       └─ Chemical Cabinet  (cabinet)

The landing page lists every location as cards or rows with its path shown underneath, grouped by type or by category, rather than as a tree you have to expand. You walk the hierarchy by opening a location and looking at its Contents.

Filling a Location

A location's Contents tab is where things go in.

With shelves only, you get a list of shelves. Add one, rename it, and use + Add item to put something on it.

With shelves and boxes, each shelf shows its boxes, and opening one gives you the box map.

The Box Map

The map is a grid of the box's cells, laid out the way the box is. Click an empty cell to place something in it, and drag between cells to move a tube or swap two. Each cell shows what's in it, so a freezer box stops being a thing you have to open to understand.

A freezer belongs to the lab, not to one project, so a box can hold work from several projects at once. Cells filled by a project you're not on read as Taken by another project, with no name, no owner, and nothing else, because that material isn't yours to see. They can't be clicked, moved, or placed into, and they don't turn up in a search of the box. The point is that the map matches the physical box: a position that's spoken for looks spoken for, rather than looking free until you try to use it.

Color by is the part worth knowing about, because it changes what question the map answers:

Age bands are chosen to land on spans people think in, so you get "< 3 mo", "3 mo to 1 yr", "> 2 yr" rather than arbitrary slices, and each cell can show its own age. The legend is built from what's actually in the box in front of you, so it never lists a project or an age band that isn't there.

Find in this box highlights matches as you type and shows how many it found, which beats reading 81 cells looking for one tube. The grid stays put while you search rather than filtering down, because the point is to see where the match is.

Anything assigned to the box but not yet given a cell sits in a strip below the grid, with a button to place one or to fill the free cells all at once.

Scan items in on a location's header is the fastest way to fill one. Start a session and every code you scan is placed into that location, allocating the next free cell in a box automatically. The banner counts as you go, survives switching tabs, and stops when you press Done. On a phone, and in the app on any screen, a session opens the camera and holds it open so a rack goes in tube after tube; close it and Scan on the banner brings it back.

You can still assign a location from a sample or an item's own profile. Both directions stay in sync.

Location Details

Beyond name and parent, a location's Details tab carries what its type needs: whether it's bookable, its capacity, its temperature and storage conditions, and, where they apply, asset details (tag, serial, manufacturer, model), environmental monitoring, compliance and safety, growing conditions, and booking rules.

A flow cytometer also gets an Optical configuration card listing each laser and its detectors. Create one from a model Conspecta recognizes and the card starts out with the manufacturer's published base configuration, and an empty card offers to fill that in with one click. For other machines, Conspecta reads the instrument's name (a cytometer called "Aurora 3" gets its model's configuration recommended), and the card offers a search over every published base configuration. Either way it's marked as the maker's base setup, because installations vary and yours may differ, and nothing is recorded without your say-so.

A cytometer also gets a Measured dyes card listing what the lab has actually read on that machine: each dye, the lot it came from, and the date it was measured. Those readings are derived from single-stain control files under Reference controls on the Panels tab in Cytometry, and they belong to the machine rather than to any one project. Everyone in the lab designs against the same curves, so nobody spends another stained tube re-reading a control a colleague has already run, and a cytometer a core facility shares with you brings its measured dyes along. The card is read-only, because deriving a dye needs the control file itself.

A location's status is Operational, Maintenance Required, Broken, or Decommissioned. Maintenance Scheduled appears on its own while downtime sits on the calendar and clears itself when the block passes, so it can never disagree with the schedule. Choosing it from the status menu opens the downtime scheduler instead of setting a status by hand.

Expiring soon on the landing page lists everything in the facility approaching its date or already past it, reagents and samples together, across every location.

Book Time on an Instrument

Bookable locations get a Schedule tab. Instruments have it out of the box and open straight on it, and any location can be made bookable from its Details tab. A brand new instrument is the exception: it opens on Details first, so you can record its make, model, and booking rules before anyone reserves time.

The schedule is a grid of the location's reservations, a week at a time on desktop and a day at a time on a phone:

• Click a free slot to book it. Pick which project the session is for, which is what links the booking to the work it produces, and add a short note. If the team has no projects yet, name one right in the booking form and it's created with the booking.
• Double-booking is impossible. If someone takes the slot between your click and your confirm, you'll be told the time is already booked and can pick another. Back-to-back bookings are fine: a session ending at 11:00 and one starting at 11:00 don't collide.
• Cancel from the Upcoming list below the grid, which frees the slot immediately. You can cancel your own bookings there, and team admins can cancel anyone's by opening the booking itself. An admin can also Release slot on a session that has already started but isn't being used.

You'll get a reminder in your Inbox about 30 minutes before each session. If the lab schedules downtime over your booking, the booking is cancelled and the notification tells you which instrument, when, and why.

Booking rules on the Details tab are what keep a shared instrument fair: slot size, shortest and longest booking, gaps between bookings, how far ahead people can book, notice required, how far back a past session can be logged, a cancellation cutoff, a weekly cap per person, plus operating hours and closures. Everyone can read the rules, and team owners and admins can change them.

The facility landing's Schedule button shows every bookable instrument side by side for one day, which is the "what's free right now" view. Filter it by instrument kind, and click any column to jump into that instrument's own schedule.

Anyone on the team can see the schedule. Booking needs a team role above viewer. Export calendar downloads your own recent and upcoming sessions as an .ics file for Google Calendar or Outlook.

Downtime and Notices

Schedule downtime takes an instrument out of service for maintenance, a repair, a calibration, or because it's reserved. Bookings inside the window are cancelled and the people who held them are told.

Sometimes a machine is usable but people should know something, like a flaky laser or a noisy stage motor. Admins can Post notice from the Schedule tab, optionally marking it as a caution that results may be affected. It shows as a banner on the instrument, in the booking form, and as a ⚠ beside the instrument's name in the facility-wide day view. Everyone with an upcoming booking is notified, and notices expire on their own after 30 days.

An instrument marked Maintenance Required warns rather than blocks. Booking it asks you to acknowledge that results may be affected, but never stops you, because a lab with one instrument can't stop working while a service visit is weeks out.

Booking a session that runs before scheduled maintenance or a repair asks for the same acknowledgement, and names the window it's waiting on. The machine hasn't been serviced yet, so the caution is the same one the status flag gives. Sessions after the window, and sessions before a calibration or a reserved block, say nothing.

Service History

Bookable equipment gets a Maintenance tab, which is the service log your lab probably keeps in a spreadsheet today. Each entry records the kind of work (preventive, repair, calibration, or upgrade), when it was done, who did it (often a vendor technician, so it's free text), what was done, and what it cost. Anyone can read the log, and admins add to it.

Set a service interval on the Details tab and the due date takes care of itself. Logging a completed service moves it forward, the tab shows an amber banner once the machine is overdue, and the team's admins are notified so the vendor visit gets booked before anyone's data depends on it.

Usage and Billing

Every bookable location has a Sessions tab built around a billing period: last month, this month, or a custom range for quarters and fiscal calendars that don't fall on ours.

Tiles across the top total the period's booked hours, completed sessions, how many people used the machine, and, when operating hours are configured, its utilization. Below that, a table grouped by project, person, or month gives hours, session counts, cancellations, and each group's share of the period, so a facility manager sees who to charge and a group lead sees what their project owes. Expand any row to audit the sessions behind it.

Export usage asks which shape you want: a summary mirroring the table exactly as grouped, which is the bill sheet, or individual sessions, one row each with date, times, duration, who booked, project, status, and notes, which is the audit trail. Only completed sessions count toward hours, and cancelled and released bookings are tallied separately, so a group that keeps reserving time and dropping it stands out.

Linking a Session to What It Produced

Once a session is over, expand it on the Sessions tab to see what the project recorded during that window: images, image sets, image analysis and cytometry runs, notes, and protocol runs. Each suggestion says why it's there, so "acquired 15:12 on LSRFortessa" means the file's own metadata carries both the time and the instrument's name. Link to session connects it. Nothing is ever linked automatically, so the record only says what someone confirmed.

Exporting

The Facility export in Settings → Export produces an Excel sheet of your locations with their types, statuses, temperatures, and conditions.