Lab Tracker: A Serverless, Mobile-First System for Usage-Based Stock Forecasting and Conflict-Free Equipment Booking in Educational Laboratories

Teaching laboratories track chemicals, consumables and instruments on paper registers or spreadsheets and share instruments through informal sign-up sheets. This causes unnoticed stock-outs, expired reagents and scheduling clashes during practical sessions. Existing laboratory inventory tools offer barcode entry and low-stock alerts, but many are commercial, server-based or built for research and clinical laboratories. This paper presents Lab Tracker, a free, browser-based system built on Supabase and Vercel that combines one-tap usage logging with a ten-minute undo, stock-out forecasts computed from the last 14 days of logged use, expiry warnings on the dashboard and by e-mail five days and one day before expiry, QR-code assisted item entry, equipment booking in which overlapping bookings are rejected by a database constraint, with maintenance blocks, return tracking and overdue flags, role-based access for lab assistants and teachers verified by organization e-mail and staff ID, anonymized CSV export of booking data, and a built-in assistant and feedback form. We describe the design and implementation, report functional tests of the main workflows, done mostly with sample data and partly by manual checks, and outline a planned user study in a college laboratory.