For Principal Investigators

When the freezer fails,
what can you prove you lost?

A freezer failure at 3 am destroys more than samples — it destroys your ability to claim what was there. Vial Tracker Free gives you a timestamped, searchable inventory before the alarm goes off.

Download Free How We Support See it in action
100%Free forever
ExcelNo new tools
AuditReady records
"The insurance assessor asked for a sample manifest. We handed them three notebooks, two spreadsheets, and an apology."
— The situation Vial Tracker Free prevents
The problem

Freezer failures are underinsured because labs can't prove what they had

Equipment failure happens. A compressor gives out over a long weekend. A power cut bypasses the alarm. A door seal fails silently for weeks. You discover it Monday morning.

The immediate loss is obvious. But the secondary loss — the weeks spent trying to reconstruct what was in each box, from whose handwriting, from which decade — is entirely avoidable.

Insurance claims require documented inventories. Grant bodies require proof of resources lost. Collaborators need to know if shared samples survived. Without a pre-existing record, every answer is a guess at best, and a legal liability at worst.

What you can't prove after a failure
No documented inventory means no insurance claim
Grant bodies require proof of resources lost in a failure
Collaborators need to confirm shared sample status
Repeat experiments cost months and thousands of dollars
What you get

Built for the real-world lab

Pre-event inventory
A complete, timestamped record of every vial by box, freezer, and researcher — created before any incident, not scrambled together after.
Audit-ready proof
Each entry carries a date, owner, and location. Exactly what insurance assessors and grant administrators ask for.
Shared sample tracking
When samples are held jointly with collaborating labs, Vial Tracker Free documents what was yours, theirs, and shared — before anyone needs to argue the point.
No special infrastructure
It's Excel. It works offline. It doesn't depend on a server that can also fail during a power cut.
How it works

Up and running in an afternoon

1
Download the file
No installation, no account. Open it in Excel today.
2
Log your inventory once
Each researcher enters their vials with location, passage, and metadata. Takes an afternoon.
3
Keep it as your standing record
Update it when samples change. The audit trail is automatic — every change is logged with a date and name.
Also on this site

Other challenges Vial Tracker Free solves for PIs

Post-Doc Departure
Keep your lab's institutional memory intact when a researcher moves on.
Biosafety & Audit Compliance
Build an audit-ready sample inventory so the next inspection is never a scramble.
Grant Resource Documentation
Answer reviewers' questions about your lab's biological resources with a single export.
Material Transfer Agreements
Track which samples are shared, with whom, and under which MTA — automatically.
PhD Student Handover
When your student submits, their sample knowledge shouldn't leave with them.
Publication Traceability
Trace every published result back to the exact vial it came from, on demand.

Your inventory should exist before the emergency

Download Vial Tracker Free today. It costs nothing, requires no new tools, and takes an afternoon to set up. Your next freezer failure is coming — be documented before it does.

Download Vial Tracker Free — it's free
Works in Excel
No account required
Works alongside any LIMS
Made in Singapore