I find Calira incredibly useful for booking scientific equipment, managing financial cost reporting, and facilitating payments. It provides a clear real-time overview of equipment availability and location, which helps researchers plan their work efficiently. I like that it makes the status of instruments clear and includes specification details, saving time for users. Generating reports on research groups is a breeze, and it’s great for tracking financial returns from each instrument. It also helps to identify the most efficient users. Adding users and instruments is straightforward, and I appreciate how it streamlines usage hours to ensure fair access to lab equipment and prevent overuse. The platform is very straightforward and easy to set up; everything flows logically, and inviting or removing users is simple. Overall, I genuinely believe it’s the best platform for an online booking equipment calendar that I have used in many years. Customer support from Nathan is very professiona and efficient. The team provide rapid replies and related information to messages and queries sent to them.

Equipment booking, the lab dashboard and being able to send announcement to all lab users.

The UI is intuitive and easy to use. Being able to set individual or group booking rules means user-access can be managed effectively based on their experience level; this protects sensitive instruments against misuse. As a TRAC costed facility we need to be able to log instrument uptime/downtime, user numbers , income generated and maintenance. We also need to assign sessions and costs to specific UKRI funding bodies which can do easily through the Projects option. Reports and spreadsheets capturing all of these metrics can then be generated at the click of a button. Being able to upload documents to each individual equipment dashboard is superb as we can then have the Risk Assessments, Standard operating procedures , instruction manuals etc available to every user at the point of booking. Support from Calira has been excellent and the software is competitively priced. As an academic facility with limited budget fully integrated PIMS and LIMS systems are prohibitively expensive and not an option for us. They are also overly complicated and often have a level of functionality we do not need, Calira provides everything we need.