Create or join a laboratory
Everything inside LabFlow belongs to a laboratory. A signed-in account with no active membership is sent to /onboarding from every internal route, because there is nowhere else it can usefully be.
Anyone signed in can open the wizard.
The five steps
/onboarding carries the step in the URL (?step=), so a half-finished setup survives a refresh. /onboarding/setup-laboratory is the same wizard, opened at the laboratory step.
| Step | What it asks |
|---|---|
| Your details | Given name, family name, the sign-in address, a direct phone number |
| The laboratory | Its name, its town or city, and its accreditation — CAP, a national or regional scheme, or none declared. A scheme takes a certificate number, an expiry date, and optionally the certificate itself |
| Departments | Which departments actually run here |
| Colleagues | Their Google sign-in addresses, so invitations go out with the laboratory |
| Review | Everything, before anything is created |
The review step exists because the whole wizard is one write. Nothing is created until you finish it, and then the laboratory, its settings, its departments, your owner membership, your profile and its draft public listing are all created in a single transaction — all of it, or none of it.
The taken-name rule
A laboratory name is refused when a published listing already carries it, or when the same name already exists in the same town. Two laboratories called "City Lab" in two different towns stay allowed; two in one town do not.
The check runs before any file is uploaded, so a rejected name never costs you an upload.
Departments are one vocabulary
The departments you tick are the same nine words used everywhere else in the product: on your public listing, and as the release scope granted to each colleague at /users. One vocabulary, so a technician's permission to release haematology means the same thing as the laboratory's declaration that it runs haematology.
The time zone
The wizard derives a time zone from the town you entered, falling back to the device's own zone. It is shown in the field — never a silent UTC — and it becomes the laboratory's setting.
Inviting colleagues
Invitations are sent as part of creating the laboratory. An invitation whose email fails to send is removed, so no half-invitation is left behind; the page tells you which addresses went. A failed invitation does not undo the laboratory.
Colleagues accept by signing in with the invited address and choosing the laboratory. More can be added later — see users and access.
The accreditation certificate
If you attach one, it is uploaded as a private object. Its storage identifier is not readable by the browser at all — the same rule that protects identity documents.
What the wizard does not do
It creates the laboratory, its people and its draft listing. It does not load a test catalogue, reference ranges or critical-value thresholds — those are yours to configure, and the wizard says so at the end rather than pretending otherwise. LabFlow ships no pre-loaded national test menu and no default clinical reference intervals; shipping either would mean shipping somebody else's clinical decisions as your default.
Start with the test catalogue.