Equipment loans and prep room stock
The measure of a school store is whether the lesson can run. Not whether the count is elegant — whether there are thirty of the thing, in the room, at nine o'clock, and whether twenty-eight of them come back.
No card, no sales call. Set up as education and the whole system uses these words — resources, equipment, class.
Why school stores lose things
Everything happens in a rush, in short windows, with a large number of borrowers who are not accountable in the way an employee is. A sign-out sheet at the start of a practical is a sheet nobody fills in.
Budgets are annual and tight, so a set that quietly loses four items a term becomes a replacement purchase that competes with something else. The loss is real and invisible at the same time.
And the knowledge sits with one technician. When they are away, or leave, the informal system — which was working — goes with them.
What Nilstock does in a education prep room
Issue a set for a lesson
Scan the student or the class card, scan the kit, confirm. Fast enough to happen at the start of a practical rather than instead of one.
Get it back at the end
Check items back in and what is missing is a short list, immediately, while the class is still in the room. That is the difference between a lost item and a found one.
Prep room consumables
Chemicals, components, materials and PPE counted with minimum levels, and a digest so ordering happens in the technician's own time rather than in an emergency.
IT suite and loan devices
Laptops and tablets tracked to a student with a due date, so the end-of-term collection is a list rather than a search.
A record that survives a handover
Because it is written down rather than remembered, cover staff and new technicians can run the store on day one, without the informal system that lived in one person's head walking out of the door with them.
Termly stocktakes without losing a day
Count one cupboard at a time between lessons rather than shutting the prep room for an afternoon. Differences post as their own ledger entries against whoever counted, so the figure the budget is built on has a name and a date behind it.
All of it is the same engine everyone else gets — see the full feature list.
Questions people in this sector ask
- Can students use it without accounts?
- Yes, and that is the design. Students are identified by a card or a number at a terminal. Only staff administrators have passwords, and pricing is per site rather than per user, so a whole cohort costs nothing extra.
- Do you hold student personal data?
- Only what you enter — typically a name and a number. There is no requirement to store anything beyond that, and everything is exportable and deletable. Our privacy page sets out the detail.
- What does it cost for a school?
- £79 or £149 per site per month depending on the plan, with unlimited people and terminals. A multi-site trust is priced per site; talk to us if that is a lot of sites.
- Can we run it in more than one department?
- Yes. Science prep, DT workshop and IT can each be a site with its own balances and its own staff access, inside one account.
- Is there a purchase-order route rather than a card?
- Yes — write to us and we will invoice annually. We know a school cannot always put a subscription on a card.
- What happens at the end of the year when everything comes back at once?
- Check items in as they arrive; what is still out is a live list you can act on while students are still in the building. That is the difference between a collection and a search, and it is the week the system pays for itself.
- Can a technician run it without IT setting anything up?
- Yes. It is a web page — no install, no server, no agent on the network. A spare PC or tablet in the prep room and a £30 reader is the whole deployment, and pairing it takes one six-character code.
Guides worth reading first
Equipment
How to stop losing tools on site without treating people like suspects
Most tools are not stolen — they are in a van or a toolbox and nobody wrote it down. What works for tool accountability, and what makes it worse.
Stock control
How to set reorder points that actually prevent stockouts
A reorder point is lead-time usage plus a buffer sized by consequence. The formula, how to get the two inputs honestly, and two worked examples.
Stock control
When a stores spreadsheet stops working (and why it is not the spreadsheet)
Most stores spreadsheets stop being accurate within months, and the cause is not Excel. Four signs you have crossed the line, and what actually fixes it.
Same engine, other sectors
Stop guessing what is in the prep room
Fourteen days free. Import your list, pair a tablet, and find out where things actually go. It takes about half an hour to reach a real movement.
Resources counted, equipment tracked to a student, every movement logged.