Lab Inventory Management Features
Reagents, supplies and samples, with experiment planning, reporting and compliance around them. Built for research teams that need inventory management without the complexity.
Reagents, supplies and samples, all in one inventory
In a survey of ~1,000 lab professionals, 70% said their biggest inventory problem is simply not knowing what they already have. That is rarely just reagents. A working bench runs on reagents tracked by lot, on supplies like tips, plates and gloves, and in a lot of labs on samples with a history behind them. Labsistant tracks all three, each with the fields that kind of thing actually needs.
- Reagents at the lot level, with batch and catalog numbers, vendor, and automatic expiration monitoring
- Supplies as their own kind, counted in the packaging you actually buy: each, box, pack, case, roll, bottle, bag. Nothing invents an expiry date for a box of gloves. On every plan, including Free.
- Samples with the parent they came from and their freeze and thaw historyLab plan
- Personal, group and shared ownership, so a shelf can belong to one person, to a subteam, or to the whole lab. Group ownership needs the Team plan.
- Pull a portion for your own use, or split one container into severalTeam plan
- Hand an item over to someone else when they take the project onTeam plan
- Ask the manager, owner or group for stock with a tracked request instead of a hallway conversation
- Lot-level recall and traceability support
- Sterile and RNase-free status tracking for sensitive reagentsLab plan
- Purchase cost recorded against the lot, with a lab-wide currency setting (7 currencies supported)Team plan
Describe what you need. Edna drafts it, you confirm it.
Edna is the assistant built into Labsistant. Ask a question in plain language and get the answer from your own lab's records. Ask for a change and Edna fills in a confirmation card showing exactly what will happen, and nothing is written until you approve it. Included from the Team plan up.
- Look things up: what is in stock, where an item came from, which slots in a box are still free
- Add and adjust: create reagents, supplies and storage locations, update a quantity, split an item, close one out
- Run experiments: build and reuse templates, schedule a run, start it, pull and return reagents against it, complete or cancel it
- Mix a recipe: check what it needs and make it from what is on the shelf
- Handle samples: create one, derive a new one from it, thaw it, retire it
- Ask for stock: raise a request for an item, and see the requests already open
- Pull the numbers: usage and cost figures for any period, including what an experiment cost to run
- Search the help guides without leaving the page you are on
- Hand over a packing slip or a photo of a catalog page, and Edna reads it and proposes the reagents on it
Edna never acts unprompted. Every change waits behind a confirmation card you have to approve, and a PI can switch Edna's ability to make changes off for the whole lab at any time.
Set up your lab from the spreadsheet you already keep
Give Labsistant the file you have been maintaining. It asks what the file holds, works out what each column means, shows you everything it understood, and creates nothing at all until you say yes. Starting from an empty lab works too, if you would rather build it up as you go.
- Tell it what the file holds: reagents, supplies, or samples. The column headings are re-read for that kind, so a sample sheet is never forced into a reagent shape.
- Column matching starts with a plain offline guess from the headings, so the whole flow works with AI switched off.
- Turn the AI mapper on if you want a second opinion. It knows which kind the file holds, and when two columns mean the same thing it says so and asks you which one to use.
- A review grid lays out every row exactly as it was understood, before a single item exists.
- Storage locations are clustered and deduplicated, so "Freezer 1 shelf 2" and "freezer-1/shelf2" become one shelf instead of two.
- Then a confirm-locations step, where you approve the freezers, shelves and boxes it found. Nothing is created until you approve it.
Every path that creates something in Labsistant asks where it is stored, with a real picker and nothing pre-filled on your behalf. Knowing where a thing actually is is not an optional field here. It is most of the point.
What can I make right now, from what is actually on the shelf?
A lot of what a lab runs on is made, not bought. Labsistant holds the recipes and checks them against your current stock, so that question has an answer on screen instead of a walk to the fridge and a guess. Included from the Team plan up.
- A live makeable list: every reagent your lab knows how to make, and which of them you have the components for today
- Write a recipe as the components it consumes, with the quantity and unit of each
- Add a reagent now and work out its recipe later. It sits in the list marked "Recipe TBD" instead of blocking you.
- Making a batch deducts the components and creates the output item in one step, so the shelf count stays honest without anyone remembering to subtract
- Anything counted in whole things comes out as a whole number. You never end up holding 2.4 plates.
- The output remembers what went into it, so opening a made reagent shows the recipe it came from and the exact components consumed
Scheduled experiments deduct what they use, as they use it
Nearly one in four researchers report missing experiments because a reagent was unavailable when needed. Build a template once with everything the run needs, schedule it on a calendar, and let the stock come down as the work happens rather than at a stocktake three weeks later. Experiments are included from the Team plan up.
- Reusable experiment templates with protocols
- Requirements can be reagents, supplies or samples, because a run needs tips and plates as much as it needs buffer
- Leave a sample slot open on the template and fill it in when you schedule the run, so one protocol covers every sample you put through it
- Visual calendar for scheduling and planning
- Pull what you need against a running experiment, and return whatever you did not use, so the count reflects the bench rather than the plan
- Zone-aware reagent sourcing rulesLab plan
- Ask Edna to schedule a run, start it, or close it out, without leaving what you were doing
Samples that remember where they came from
A sample is not a bottle you reorder. It has a parent, a history, and a number of thaws behind it that changes what it is worth. Labsistant tracks samples as their own kind of item, keeps the lineage, and records every thaw. Available on the Lab plan.
- Samples sit alongside reagents and supplies in the same inventory, with the fields a sample actually needs rather than a reagent form with blanks in it
- Derive a new sample from an existing one and the link between them is kept, so you can follow any sample back to the one it came from
- Thaw and refreeze are recorded events, not something you keep in your head or on the lid in marker
- Every thaw and refreeze lands in the audit trail with the reason given, so the freeze-thaw history of a sample is a record rather than a recollection
- An experiment can require a sample, including as an open slot on a reusable template that you fill in when you schedule the run
- Retire a sample when it is spent. It leaves the working list without leaving a hole in the history
- Edna can create a sample, derive one from it, or mark it thawed, with the same confirmation card as anything else
To be clear about what this is not: Labsistant tracks samples, their lineage and their freeze-thaw history. It does not route them through a workflow engine, and it is not trying to be your LIMS.
A digital twin of your lab at a glance
Lay out your lab the way it is actually arranged: rooms, freezers, shelves, boxes, right down to the slot. Then finding something is looking it up rather than opening doors.
- Hierarchical storage locations (rooms, freezers, shelves)
- Temperature tracking (freezer, fridge, room temp)
- Containment zones (BSL-2, clean rooms, hoods)Lab plan
- Zone-based flow rules for complianceLab plan
- Visual organization with custom naming
- Box-level slot picking, so an item lives in position C4 of a specific box rather than somewhere in a freezer
- Personal items keep their location private. A labmate sees that the slot is taken, never whose item is in it or what it is.
That last one is deliberate. A shared freezer should not become a list of what everyone else is working on, so Labsistant shows a colleague only that a slot is occupied. The map stays accurate and nobody has to read your project off a shelf.
Stock alerts that watch so you can focus on research
The median lab loses roughly $9,600 per year to expired or wasted chemicals. Never run out of critical reagents. Set personal and group alerts at custom thresholds and get notified before stock runs low or expiration dates approach.
- Personal alerts on every plan, and group-level alerts once you have groupsTeam plan
- Custom threshold-based notifications
- Location-specific monitoring
- Low and critical status indicators
- Dashboard alerts for quick visibility
- A notification centre that collects everything that needs your attention in one list, on every plan
- Email as well, if you would rather not have to open the app to find outTeam plan
- Or collect it into one daily or weekly digest instead of a mail per eventTeam plan
- Choose which kinds of thing reach you, per channel, and unsubscribe from any of them in one click
See where the money and the reagents actually go
Pick a range of 7 days, 30, 90, or the whole history, and read the answer. Every figure is worked out on the server across the entire range, not added up in your browser from whatever happened to fit on screen. Reporting is included from the Team plan up.
- Usage: what the lab actually consumed over the range you chose
- Cost and value: what you spent, and what is sitting on the shelves right now
- Waste: what went in the bin, and what it cost you
- Experiment cost: what a run actually cost to perform, from what it consumed
- Team activity: who did what, over the same range
- Save a report you run often and open it again later, without rebuilding the filters
- A big report keeps running after you navigate away, and is waiting for you when you come back
- Days until you run out, worked out per reagent from how fast it is genuinely being used. This one covers reagents, not supplies.Lab plan
Two things Labsistant deliberately will not do. It never adds quantities in different units together, and it never adds amounts in different currencies together, because there is no exchange rate in here that would make either of those honest. A chart shows one unit and names it, and money is always reported per currency.
A single source of truth for audits and research
Barely half of labs say they feel prepared for an unannounced audit. Maintain complete, immutable records of every inventory change. Built for regulatory compliance with audit logs that can never be deleted or modified.
- Complete immutable history of all changes
- Every inventory action recorded automatically
- User attribution on all actions
- Compliance-ready reporting and export
- Cannot be deleted or modified by anyone
- Search the log and filter it by person, by reagent, by lot, by kind of event, or by date
- How far back you can look depends on your plan: 7 days on Free, 90 days on Team, and the whole history on the Lab plan
Give every team member the access they need
Built for how research teams actually work. Role-based permissions ensure everyone sees what they need while maintaining proper access control.
- Three role levels: PI, Researcher, Junior Researcher. The Junior Researcher role needs the Team plan.
- User groups for project organizationTeam plan
- Role-based permissions throughout the app
- Lab-wide visibility and settings for PIs
- Email-based invite onboarding
- Need something that belongs to a colleague? Raise a request against their item instead of taking it, and the whole exchange is on the record.
- Hand your items over when you finish a project or leave, so nothing becomes an orphan in a freezerTeam plan
- A help centre inside the app, on every plan including Free, so a new labmate can look something up without asking you
