Capabilities
From material intake to the report that substantiates it
What follows is the functional scope of the system, from material provenance to the reports that substantiate it.
Material and its history
Provenance and deposit agreement
Where each material came from and on what terms, including the uses the depositor authorised. It is what allows sharing without exposure, and what the Nagoya Protocol expects a bank to be able to show.
Conserved unit passport
Stable identity, biological classification, provenance and status — carrying the fields its kingdom's standard requires from the first record, not bolted on later through a migration.
Processing cycle
Intake, conditioning, testing and replenishment, each dated and attributed. Plant testing runs on a cadence and warns when it lapses; animal health status travels with the material.
Data quality
Draft, validated and published states; kingdom-specific validation rules; duplicate detection; and an audit trail of every write with author and prior value.
Inventory
Physical structure and stock
Store, container and position, with each vessel located and counted. Stock is not typed in: it is derived from movements, and no movement can be edited or deleted.
Physical count and reconciliation
Counting what is actually there and squaring it against the record, with every divergence explained. Without this, a system can only promise to record what it is told.
Collection monitoring
Stock below threshold, lapsed test, container without a location. The system watches the collection when nobody else is, and warns without acting on the material.
Historical data import
Twenty years of spreadsheet come in with a row-by-row dry run — what would be created, what fails and why — and can be undone. What stops a purchase is not making a mistake: it is not being able to reverse it.
Sharing
Granular visibility
Private, shared or available, decided per unit and per container independently, with the policy on which fields are exposed staying with the bank.
Requests with reservation
Request, assessment with recorded reasoning, approval that reserves stock, dispatch with its transfer agreement and acknowledgement of receipt. Approving without reserving is promising what cannot be delivered.
Feedback to the depositor
Whoever deposited material can check it is still conserved and what it has been used for, without seeing anything else. For a breeders' association or a seed-saving network, that is what sustains the relationship with the member.
Reporting and export
Collection reports and exchange with sector registries, always declaring coverage: how many units went in, how many did not and why.
How it is deployed
Akervo runs as a managed service and as an installation on the customer's own infrastructure. It is the same product: there is no cut-down edition for those who self-host, and no capability depends on being hosted by us.
A self-hosted installation upgrades with schema migration, requires a verified backup before migrating, and is diagnosed through a package that carries no collection data.