Chemical inventory for universities

Sites and locations form a tree: building, floor or room, store, cabinet, shelf. A department with several buildings can model each lab with the shelves that matter and leave the rest coarse. Grouping by location shows what a single lab holds. Grouping by storage class shows the department's flammable stock, wherever it sits.

The incompatibility check works at location level. If a cabinet holds both an oxidiser and a flammable, the row's drawer says so and an alert is raised. It reflects what has been recorded, so a shelf that people use informally will only be checked if the record shows it.

Each row can carry an owner. On the University plan that becomes principal investigator ownership, so a department can ask what a named group holds. That question usually comes up at the worst moment: a group is leaving, a lab is being refurbished or a grant is closing. If ownership has been kept up, the answer is a report that can be handed to the outgoing PI with a request to sign off what stays and what goes.

Stock that nobody claims is where departments tend to run into cost and risk. Our expired and unlabelled chemical disposal page deals with that, and a stock check before the move is the place to start.

An approver role signs off disposal requests above a value you set. For a department with its own waste budget, that means a technician or lab manager can build a request from the register while the budget holder keeps the final say. Requests below that value go straight through.

API keys are available from the University plan upwards, so a department can read its register from its own systems. Webhooks report job status, which helps if your estates team tracks waste movements elsewhere. The product is a system of record for chemical stock, and we have no plans to make it a full laboratory information management system.

Stock check mode works by location on a phone. You do not have to walk the whole department at once. Doing a floor at a time, or a group at a time, keeps the job in manageable pieces. Each check produces a signed report and a proposed disposal list.

Items found without records can be added, and anything unlabelled can be photographed. For an old reagent with a handwritten label, the AI assistant may suggest candidates. Below its confidence threshold, or for anything resembling a peroxide former, picric acid or an old container, it recommends a store assessment and blocks automatic pricing of that line. Research labs hold more unusual stock than most, so expect to use that route more often than a school does.

A disposal request builds from the register's rows, with free-text additions for anything not on the record. Box 4 arranges collection through registered hazardous waste carriers and quotes one itemised price. You can use general laboratory stream entries alongside itemised chemicals.

Segregation matters at this stage. The Environment Agency's rules prohibit mixing hazardous waste with non-hazardous waste, or mixing different categories of hazardous waste, without specific authorisation. A waste solvent carboy shared by a lab is a common place for this to go wrong, particularly with halogenated and non-halogenated solvents. The register cannot watch the carboy. It can record what should be going in and flag it on the request. Solvent waste collection goes into more detail.

On acceptance, a pre-filled consignment note is generated for England, Wales or Scotland. When signed documents return, rows move to disposed with the note attached, which gives a university a searchable archive. If a department is asked what left in a given year, the answer comes from a report and not from a filing cabinet.

A departmental safety officer can pull the full register, stock by location, stock by storage class and a COSHH hazardous substances register, all as PDF and XLSX. Our reporting page lists them. Draft COSHH entries from the assistant are marked as drafts for the competent person to sign. In a university that person's assessment will also need to cover experimental procedures, which a stock record knows nothing about.

Universities tend to ask harder questions than most, so here are the answers. The register has no chemical structure search. It does not manage equipment bookings, training records, purchase orders or biological samples. Single sign-on is on the Hospital plan and above, as set out in the plan table on our pricing page. We hold no security certifications, and backups are stored in Germany. The security page sets all of this out so you can raise it early.

The plan is £149 a month or £1,490 a year per department, invoiced and paid by BACS. See pricing, or look at university chemical waste collection for the service side.