Setting Up Your Laboratory

The Setup Wizard walks you through everything your laboratory needs, one step at a time. Each step is a single, contained task with its own Save point — you can stop after any step and pick up exactly where you left off. Find it anytime at Admin Panel → Setup & Modules.

Setup has two parts: eight core steps that get your lab to its first Morning QC, then a module gallery where you turn on the optional modules your lab uses.

Part 1 — The Core Steps

1. Welcome & your lab (~1 min). Confirm your lab's name, location, and director. This information appears on your signed reports.

2. Departments (~2 min). Your lab starts with the standard defaults — Embryology, Andrology, and Chemistry. Add departments to match how your lab is organized, one at a time or from a spreadsheet. To rename a department, use the Open full page link to the full Departments page.

3. Your team (~5 min). Invite everyone who records QC — early, so you can delegate the rest of setup to a supervisor if you'd like. Staff can enter results; supervisors can edit, review, and complete every remaining setup step — including turning modules on or off and undoing steps; directors configure the lab. Each person receives an email invitation to set their password. A staff spreadsheet upload is available for larger teams.

4. Your equipment (~15–30 min). Add every instrument you QC — incubators, refrigerators, freezers, tanks, and more. The fastest path: open the equipment builder, pick your department template, and set quantities (for example, Incubator ×6 creates Incubator 1 through 6 with standard QC parameters, maintenance, and verification schedules included). Prefer a spreadsheet? Download the Excel template, fill one row per instrument, and upload it. Have on hand: your equipment list, and serial numbers if you track them.

5. QC parameters (~15–45 min). Each instrument needs the values you check daily — temperature, CO₂, LN₂ level, and so on. Standard parameters are pre-filled for your equipment types; your job is to review the acceptable ranges against your lab's validated ranges and adjust. These ranges decide what counts as out-of-range, so this step deserves care.

6. Alert emails (~2 min). Choose which alerts you receive — missed QC, out-of-range results, overdue maintenance. Without this step the system stays silent when something needs attention, so don't skip it.

7. Check order (~3 min, optional). Arrange equipment in the order you physically walk the lab each morning. The default order works fine if you'd rather move on.

8. Run your first Morning QC (~10 min). Enter today's real readings. When you finish, your dashboard comes alive — and core setup is complete.

Part 2 — Choose Your Modules

Everything in the gallery is included in your subscription. Each card explains the module in one sentence with a time estimate. For each one you can:

• Set up now — opens that module's guided setup.
• Not now — leaves everything as it is; the card waits for you under "Not set up."
• Turn this module off for our lab — hides the module from everyone in your lab until you turn it back on. A confirmation explains exactly what will disappear, and a Turn back on button is always available on the card.

Modules include End-of-Day Checks, Maintenance, Verifications, Quality Events, Corrective Action Types, Document Control, SDS, Lots & COA, Proficiency Testing, Training, Employee Binders, Scheduling, the Staffing Calculator, Chemistry QC, Cryo Tank Health, sensor integrations, and importing your historical QC data from spreadsheets. The Quality Events and Training cards also offer a one-click Add the standard defaults button that seeds a common starting set you can edit later.

Save Points, Undo, and Coming Back

• Every step saves to your live configuration the moment you press Save & Continue — nothing is held in limbo.
• The Departments and Equipment steps show an Undo this step option once completed, and module cards offer undo after a spreadsheet import or a standard-defaults seed. Undo removes only rows the wizard created, and only while nothing depends on them yet (for example, equipment that already has QC records recorded can't be removed this way — the wizard will tell you why).
• Closing your browser loses only unsaved fields on the current panel. Reopening Setup returns you to your first unfinished step.
• After setup is complete, Setup & Modules stays in the Admin Panel so you can return to skipped modules, adjust configuration, or import more data at any time.

Spreadsheet Uploads

Steps that support bulk entry (departments, equipment, QC parameters, team, maintenance, verifications, and later lots, training, and QC history) offer a Download template button. Each template contains an Instructions sheet, example rows, and a Valid Values sheet listing the allowed entries for each column — and columns with a limited set of values offer a dropdown right in the Excel cell, with date and number columns validated as you type. The team template accepts more than one department per person: list them comma-separated (for example, "Embryology, Andrology"). After you upload, the wizard checks every row before anything is saved and shows a plain-language report — for example, "42 of 45 rows ready; 3 rows have problems." You can import the valid rows immediately and fix the rest, or download the error report, correct it, and re-upload. Re-uploading the same file never creates duplicates.