Grant-Funded Lab Equipment Nobody Can Locate at Audit Time
Linked to the grant and project code that paid for it
A principal investigator or technician is responsible
Certificates and due dates held against the instrument
Booking history for shared facilities
1. The Problem
Research equipment arrives on project money. A spectrometer comes on a DST grant, a centrifuge on a CSIR project, a workstation on institutional funds. The purchase is recorded in accounts, but the link between the instrument and the grant that bought it lives in the project file and the memory of the principal investigator who wrote the proposal.
Then the funding agency asks for a utilisation certificate, or the project closes and its assets must be accounted for, or the investigator moves to another institution. The instrument is somewhere on campus, possibly in a different department, possibly not working. Reconstructing which grant paid for what takes weeks of going through old files, and the answer is often incomplete. Calibration records have the same problem: the certificate exists in a drawer, and nobody knows which instruments are overdue.
2. How ASTITVAAMS Handles It
Departments usually join one at a time, starting with the labs holding the most grant-funded equipment. Four things matter:
The grant recorded with the asset
Project code, funding agency and sanction reference sit on the instrument record, so a utilisation certificate is a report rather than an investigation.
A named custodian, not a department
Each instrument sits with a person. When they move on, the handover is a record instead of a gap.
Calibration and service due dates
Certificates are held against the instrument with their expiry, and overdue calibration surfaces before an experiment depends on it.
Shared facilities booked and logged
For central instrumentation, booking history shows genuine utilisation, which is exactly what the next funding proposal needs.
Equipment stops losing its paperwork. ASTITVAAMS keeps each instrument tied to the grant that funded it, the person responsible for it and its calibration position, so a funding query is answered from one screen.
3. What Changes for You
- ✓Utilisation certificates stop taking weeks: What the grant bought, where it is and who holds it is on record, so the certificate is produced rather than assembled.
- ✓Instruments stop disappearing between departments: A named custodian and a signed handover mean equipment that moves labs is still findable a year later.
- ✓Overdue calibration is caught in advance: Due dates surface before an instrument is used for work that depends on it being in calibration.
Take This Away
A PDF covering how grant attribution is recorded, what a utilisation report contains, and how calibration tracking works for a shared facility. Useful for research administration and finance.