Colony Management Software for Core Facilities and Multi-Lab Organizations
Summary
Colony.care works at three levels. A lab tracks its animals, lines and breeding. A team runs its projects and asks the facility for services. An organization, such as a core facility or an institute, sees every team it sponsors in one portal: per diem totals by team and project, service requests, reservations of rooms, equipment and professionals, and compliance and training status across teams.
Three levels, one platform
| Level | Who works there | What Colony.care covers |
|---|---|---|
| Lab | Technicians, students, researchers | Animals, cages, lines, breeding, health follow-ups, QR code cage cards |
| Team | Principal investigator, lab manager | Projects, members and roles, per diem rates, requests sent to the facility |
| Organization | Core facility, institute, department | All sponsored teams, per diem totals, reservations, requests, compliance, training, SOPs, announcements |
Can one organization run several teams and projects?
Yes. An organization sponsors as many teams as it needs, and each team owns its projects. The organization portal lists every team and every project across them. A team can join in four ways:
- Create the team from the organization portal.
- Add an existing team: the team owner receives a transfer request and accepts it.
- Invite team leads by email: each lead gets one link, creates an account if needed, names the team, and the team joins on acceptance.
- Share an invite code, which can be limited to a number of uses and given an expiry date.
Who can do what at the organization level?
Organization members hold one administrative role and, when relevant, one operational role. The portal asks for two-factor authentication before it opens.
| Administrative roles | Operational roles |
|---|---|
| Owner | Attending Veterinarian |
| Admin | Animal Care Staff |
| Billing | Facility Manager |
| Viewer | Compliance / ACC Coordinator |
How is per diem calculated?
Every night, Colony.care reads the housing records and writes that day's billing lines for each project, using the rates in force that day. Nobody counts cages by hand at month end. The full method is in the per diem billing guide.
- Rate basis: per animal, per cage or per tank per day, or per room per month.
- Rate detail: a rate can be specific to a species (per animal) or a cage type (per cage).
- Dates: a rate applies from the day it is created until it is deactivated, so a price change does not rewrite past months.
The organization's per diem page shows the total, the cage-days and the animal-days for the current month, the previous month, or the last 30 or 90 days, broken down by team and by project. It exports to CSV. Amounts are in Canadian dollars. This is recharge billing for an animal facility, not an accounting system.
Can you reserve a room, equipment or a professional?
Yes. The organization keeps a directory of rooms, equipment and professionals, and its administrators book them for a team or for an outside client.
- Professionals: each one has a discipline (veterinarian, surgeon, technician or other), working days and hours, and an optional rate.
- Rooms and equipment: each one has a location and a capacity for simultaneous bookings.
- Conflicts: a booking that overlaps another at full capacity is stopped, and an administrator has to confirm it to go ahead. A booking outside the configured hours is refused.
- Status: booked, completed or cancelled, with a reason for the cancellation.
- Price: by the hour, the half-day, the day or as a flat fee. The estimated cost is fixed when the booking is made.
- Views and reminders: a list, a monthly calendar, and a reminder to the team the day before.
Teams do not book on their own. A team member sends a booking request, and an organization administrator accepts it and creates the reservation.
How does a team ask the facility for something?
Through a request. A team member picks a type (veterinary consult, room booking, professional booking, equipment booking or biobank order) and an urgency level. The request then moves from pending to in progress, and ends resolved or declined, or is cancelled by the requester, with a discussion thread between the team and the organization. An open request is escalated to the organization's administrators after one day when it is high or critical, and after three days otherwise. Accepting a veterinary consult opens the clinical case form in the team's project.
Can the facility bill outside clients?
Yes. The organization keeps records of external clients, such as a company or another university, with their billing address and tax rate. It books reservations for them, then groups the completed reservations of a team or a client into a numbered invoice, downloads it as a PDF, sends it by email and marks it paid.
What does the organization see across all teams?
- Overview: active teams, people, projects and animals, compared with 30 days earlier, and a list of what needs attention.
- Team comparison: animal census, clinical cases, per diem total and compliance rate, side by side.
- Animals and clinical cases: browse by team, search an animal by its identifier, follow open cases across teams.
- Compliance: protocols by team (active, expiring within 60 days, expired), the organization's own requirements, and a CCAC facility report in PDF.
- Training: valid, expiring and expired certifications by team, with CSV and Excel export. See training and competency records.
- SOP library: versioned procedures published by the organization and read by every team.
- Announcements: a message to every member of every team, with an acknowledgement when one is required.
What it does not do
- Teams and outside clients cannot book a slot themselves: an administrator creates each reservation.
- A request carries no cost. Costs come from per diem and from reservations.
- Outside clients have no login, and their invoices are not paid online.
- Per diem is billed in Canadian dollars only.
Plans
The Organization plan is quoted for each institution: one agreement covers every team it sponsors. A single team can start on its own with the free Starter plan or the Lab plan and join an organization later. See the plans, or read what vivarium management software covers day to day.