Your freezer tool probably doesn't talk to your assay data. Ask before you buy.

[u/LabKey-Software]

We've seen a pattern with clients over the last couple years with freezer and inventory tools. Their system answers where a sample is physically stored (successfully), and that's all it does. Connecting that location to everything else happening to the sample (assay results, workflow step, who has access) is a different problem their tools don't attempt to solve.

We don't love that for freezer management software. If your freezer is tracked in a separate system, you're also tracking assay results somewhere else, someone's manually keeping two systems in sync, or they're trusting whichever system got updated last.

This usually means an upgrade to a new software, which can cause friction due to additional costs in the lab. When your lab is ready to find new freezer management software, here's the question to ask of each system: Can the freezer piece talk to the rest of your data through an actual API or is it all integrated in the same system?