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Accessioning is the moment a specimen stops being someone else’s problem and becomes yours. You give it an accession number, record when it arrived and in what condition, and the handoff is written to the chain of custody.

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Before you start: is this site a full lab?

A site registered as a collection centre cannot accession. Its bench screens carry a banner reading This site is a collection center — register specimens and dispatch them to your laboratory. Accessioning, screening and reporting are done at the full lab and are disabled here. That is deliberate. A collection centre draws and refers; the full lab receives and reports. The site kind is chosen when the workspace is created — Full laboratory — testing on site or Collection center — samples drawn and referred to your lab — and it is not a per-user setting. If your banner is wrong, contact support.

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Accession the specimen

1

Open the specimen

On the Worklist, find the specimen — filter by the Received chip or search by Specimen ID, LAN or donor… — and select the row. The order workflow sheet opens with Workflow and Chain of Custody tabs, and the Workflow tab shows the form the current status calls for.
2

Enter the accession number and time

On the Laboratory Accession card, fill in Accession Number * — the lab’s own identifier, in the shape LAB-2024-00001 — and Received Date & Time *. Record the time the specimen actually arrived, not the time you got to the keyboard; it is the clock every turnaround measure runs from.
3

Check both seals

Primary Specimen Seal (Bottle A) * and Split Specimen Seal (Bottle B) * are Yes/No choices, shown green for intact and red for not. Inspect the seals against the paperwork before you answer.
4

Describe any damage

Answering “no” to either seal reveals Seal Condition Notes *, which is then required. Describe what you saw — the seal was torn, the signature did not match, the bottle leaked. This note is what a reviewer reads months later.
5

Record where Bottle B is stored

Fill in Bottle B Storage Location in enough detail that a colleague can retrieve it without you — the field’s own example is “Freezer A-2, Rack 3, Position 7”.
6

Save the accession

Save the form. The specimen moves on to the next stage of the queue and a custody event is written with the time and your name.
A broken seal raises a confirmation before the order can continue. Do not click through it to clear your queue. A compromised specimen produces a result nobody can stand behind — reject it instead, and let the requester recollect.

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Rejecting an unsuitable specimen

Rejecting is a separate grant from accessioning, and both together are the Accessioning Clerk’s whole job. Reject when the specimen cannot produce a defensible result: wrong tube, insufficient volume, no label, a seal you cannot vouch for, a transport delay past the analyte’s stability. The rejection is recorded as its own custody event, so the reason survives.

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Reading the chain of custody

The Chain of Custody tab groups every event into four phases — Specimen Intake, Laboratory Analysis, Reporting and Post-Report. Each event card shows a Seal Intact or Seal Broken pill, the released-by → received-by handoff, any notes, the timestamp and the elapsed time since the previous event. Events you will see include Order Created, CCF Completed, Specimen Collected, Specimen Shipped, Specimen Received at Lab, Specimen Rejected, Initial Immunoassay Screen, GC-MS / LC-MS-MS Confirmation, Lab Report Finalized, Report Sent to MRO, MRO Verified, Reported to DER, Order Cancelled, Split Retest Requested, Split Retest Completed and Custody Transfer.

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Check it worked

  • The specimen has left the Received filter and carries its accession number.
  • The Chain of Custody tab shows a new event under Specimen Intake with your name, the received time and the correct seal pill.
  • The elapsed time on the new event is measured from the previous handoff, not from now.

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If something goes wrong

The tab shows the form for the specimen’s current status. If the specimen is still In transit, it has not been received yet; mark the arrival first. If it is already Screening, accessioning is done.
You are at a collection centre. Register and dispatch the specimen instead — accessioning happens at the full lab.
Seal Condition Notes * becomes required as soon as either seal is marked not intact. Describe the damage; there is no way to skip it, by design.
Ask a Lab Manager. Identifiers on an accessioned specimen are part of the custody record, so corrections are made deliberately and leave their own trail — see Audit log.
The Worklist is the drug-testing bench queue. A lab running only standard clinical work sees nothing there, correctly — work those requests from Test requests instead. See Work the bench queue.