Documentation Overview
SmartQC brings your catalog, your production, and your laboratory testing into one system. This section explains each part of the platform in plain terms — what it's for, how the pieces connect, and where to go for the detail on any one of them.
In one sentence: know what you make, prove what you tested, and keep both in one place instead of three.
The guides
| Guide | Answers | Start here if… |
|---|---|---|
| Catalog | What do we make, and what's it made of? | you're setting up products, raw materials, packaging or monitoring points |
| Versioning | What did this item look like when we tested it? | you need to understand draft/approved history and snapshots |
| Lab Requests | What are we asking the lab to check, and where does it stand? | you're sending samples for testing or waiting on results |
| Manufacturing | What did we produce, from what, and how much is left? | you're recording batches, recipes, deliveries or purchases |
| Settings & Administration | Who can do what, and what does each form look like? | you're configuring fields, templates, laboratories or your team |
| API & Access | How do I call SmartQC from my own systems? | you're integrating a script, an ERP, or a laboratory's LIMS |
They build on each other in roughly this order — a catalog item gets a version, a version gets sent to the lab as a request, and a product's formula and production run from Manufacturing draw on the same catalog and can raise requests of their own:
Catalog item → Version (snapshot) → Lab Request → Laboratory result
▲ ▲
└──────────── Manufacturing (Recipes, Batches, Lots, Procurement) ───┘
Catalog
Your catalog is the master register of everything you test: Products, Raw Materials, Packaging, and Environmental monitoring points. Every one of these opens onto a dossier — one page holding its details, its composition (for products), its documents, its history, and its version record. Nothing about an item is edited anywhere else.
Versioning
Because a catalog item keeps changing — a formula gets adjusted, a supplier changes — the platform needs a way to freeze exactly what it looked like at the moment it was tested. That's a version: a permanent, self-contained snapshot. Versions move through Draft → Approved → Obsolete, and once approved, a version never changes again.
Lab Requests
A lab request is the work order: what's being tested, which tests are being asked for, and which laboratory is doing the work. Every request has two stages — Prepare (you fill in what's being asked, and of what) and Laboratory (the lab's whole side of the story: who has it, how far along they are, what came back, and the running conversation about it). A request can be raised directly, or from a catalog item's Send to lab button.
Manufacturing
Manufacturing tracks a product from formula to finished goods. A Recipe holds the approved formula a Batch is produced against; every batch draws its raw materials from Lots — dated, traceable deliveries — and a Procurement record tracks an incoming purchase from order to warehouse receipt. A released batch is traceable all the way back to the exact formula version it used and the exact lots it consumed.
→ Read the Manufacturing Guide
Settings & Administration
Everything that shapes how the other four guides behave lives here: the fields that make up your forms, the subject types that decide which fields a catalog item carries, the request templates a lab request is built from, your company settings and the columns your lists show, your team, the laboratories and examinations you work with, and the PDF templates a request prints as.
Most of these come in two flavours — Platform (shipped by SmartQC, managed by platform admins, shared by every company) and Company (yours, managed by your account owners). Company users always see both; only an owner can edit the company ones.
→ Read the Settings & Administration Guide
Who manages what
| Role | Can do |
|---|---|
| Member | Everyday work: create and edit catalog items, versions, lab requests, batches, lots, procurement. |
| Owner | Everything a Member can, plus manage the company's own fields, types, templates, laboratories, examinations, team, and settings. |
| Platform Admin | Manages the platform-wide (shared) fields, types, templates, laboratories, examinations and PDF templates every company sees. |
If something you need is greyed out or marked Platform, it's shared and managed by an admin — see Settings & Administration for exactly what each role can change.