The Experiment That Waits Because Nobody Counted the Cylinders Last Week
A 250 mL graduated cylinder in a teaching laboratory lasts about eight months before someone chips the calibration marks, sits it on a hot plate, or drops it from a bench at the wrong angle. In a lab with twenty students working three sessions a week, glass turnover is predictable — and yet most lab managers are surprised every time they run short, because nobody tracked the attrition.
This template runs a date-stamped inventory count that catches the attrition before it becomes a shortage.
Nine Vessel Types, One Date Field
Beakers, V-cones, Tall Cylinders, Fat Cylinders, Graduated Cylinders, Short Cylinders, Transparent Plastic Cylinders, 1L Plastic Beakers, Transparent Plastic Pipes. Nine integer count fields. Each record is a dated count — a snapshot of what's on the shelf or in the cabinet on a specific day.
The distinction between vessel types matters for experiment-specific requirements. V-cones (Imhoff cones) are for settleability testing — you can't substitute a graduated cylinder even if you have twenty available. A fat cylinder (wide-bore measuring cylinder) for viscous samples can't be replaced with a standard narrow graduated cylinder because the drainage error changes the reading. The template tracks each type separately because "we have cylinders" is not the same as "we have the cylinders this experiment requires."
Transparent Plastic Pipes — an unusual entry that suggests this is a specific research or industrial-training lab rather than a general chemistry teaching lab. The specificity of the inventory reflects the specificity of the work.
Lab Coat Count: The PPE Metric Nobody Tracks
Lab coat is in the inventory alongside the glassware. This is the field that most lab supply trackers omit because PPE is considered separately from consumables and equipment. The lab coat count matters for exactly one reason: when a cohort of thirty students arrives and there are nineteen lab coats in serviceable condition, eleven students either can't participate or participate unsafely.
Tracking lab coat count on the same date cadence as glassware count links PPE availability to the same shortage-detection system. When the count drops from 24 to 19 over three weekly records, the lab manager knows to order replacements before the next cohort arrives — not after.
Sorting records by date and comparing counts across consecutive weeks reveals the attrition rate for each vessel type. Two broken graduated cylinders per week means sixteen per semester. Order accordingly.