Map every freezer, book every instrument
Find any sample. Book any instrument.
Model your storage exactly as it sits in the lab: freezers, shelves, racks, and boxes, down to the individual well. File a sample into a box and its freezer, shelf, and box path lights up so anyone can retrace it.
When a sample has an address, anyone on the team can find it, by scanning its barcode or reading the exact coordinate off its card. Storage conditions travel with the location, so you always know what should be kept where.
The same workspace runs your shared instruments. Book a microscope or cytometer against the operating hours you set for each one. The schedule refuses overlapping reservations, so two people can never take the same slot, and everyone gets a reminder before their session. Block maintenance or calibration downtime and the sessions it lands on are cancelled, with a notice telling their owners why and to rebook.
Each bookable instrument keeps its own service log and service interval, so you see a machine is overdue before anyone's results depend on it. Total hours by project, person, or month across whatever billing period you pick, then export either the summary you bill from or every individual session for the audit trail. When a session ends, link it to the images, analysis runs, and notes it produced.
Book a slot in the week everyone shares
The Schedule tab shows a week of the instrument's reservations, a day at a time on a phone. Click a free slot, say which project the session is for, and the slot is yours. Two people can never hold the same one, so the week on screen is the week the lab is working to. Downtime for maintenance or calibration takes the hours it covers off the grid and tells whoever held them, and an admin's notice rides above the week where everyone booking will read it.
See whose material is filling the shared freezer
Color the box by Type, Project, or Age. Project settles the argument a shared freezer actually starts, and Age bands land on spans people think in, from under 3 months out past 2 years, so the boxes worth a clear-out are the ones that look old. The legend is built from what is in the box in front of you, so it lists the projects on this shelf and stops there. Cells a project you are not on holds stay gray, named by position and nothing else, and the count above the grid gives them their own line.
Bill instrument time back to the project that used it
Pick a billing period, last month, this month, or a custom range for a fiscal quarter, and the Sessions tab totals booked hours, completed sessions, the people who used the machine, and its utilization. The table below groups by project, person, or month with each group's share of the period, and expands into the sessions behind any row. Only completed hours count toward a bill. Cancelled and released bookings are tallied on their own, so a recharge holds up when a PI asks where the number came from.
Log every service against its interval
Each entry records the kind of work, the date, who did it (usually a vendor technician), what was done, and what it cost. Set a service interval on the Details tab and logging a completed service carries the due date forward. Once that date passes, the tab shows an amber banner and the team's admins are notified, so the visit gets booked before anyone's data depends on it.
More in the Facility workspace
Storage and boxes
Fourteen kinds of location
Instruments, freezers, fridges and incubators, cabinets, shelves, drawers and boxes, greenhouses and fields, buildings, floors and rooms, nested the way the lab is.
Shelves, or shelves and position grids
Track things to a named shelf, or add numbered grids on top so every tube has a well coordinate. Right for a biobank or a shared core facility.
Import your location list
Drop in a .csv or .tsv and confirm which field each column maps to before a single location is created. Rows that cannot be read are listed with the reason.
Find in this box
Type and matching cells light up with a count, while the grid stays put, because the point is to see where the match sits.
The unplaced strip
Anything assigned to a box but not yet given a cell waits below the grid, with a button to place one or fill the free cells at once.
Cells another project holds
A shared freezer counts them as their own part of the box, so what is yours, what is spoken for, and what is free add up to the size of the box.
Scan a rack in
Start a session and every code you scan drops into the next free cell. On a phone the camera stays open tube after tube, and the banner counts as you go.
Booking and downtime
Booking rules per instrument
Slot size, shortest and longest booking, notice required, how far ahead people can book, a weekly cap per person, plus operating hours and closures.
The whole facility in a day
Every bookable instrument side by side for one day, filtered by kind, so you can see what is free right now and click into any column.
Downtime and notices
Take a machine out for maintenance, a repair, a calibration, or a reservation, or post a notice when it is usable but people should know something.
Expiring soon, and calendar export
Everything in the facility approaching its date, reagents and samples together. Export your own sessions as an .ics for Google Calendar or Outlook.
Instrument records
Optical configuration
A cytometer lists each laser and its detectors, started from the manufacturer's published base setup for the model you name.
Dyes measured on that machine
Single-stain controls become the machine's own spectra, held with the instrument, so everyone in the lab designs panels against the same curves.
Learn more: Freezers, storage, and instruments·Book instrument time
Map your first freezer
Give every sample a position and put every shared instrument on one schedule. Free for you and one collaborator.