Case tracking and due dates for dental labs

The idea

Walk into a dental lab with eight technicians and you will find the production schedule on a whiteboard, or worse, in the owner’s head. Every case has a hard deadline: the patient is sitting in the dentist’s chair on a specific morning, and if the crown is not there, the dentist reschedules the patient and remembers exactly which lab embarrassed them. One or two late cases can lose the entire account, which might be worth thousands a month.

The incumbent software (Magic Touch and its peers) is expensive, installed, and built for large labs with front-office staff. Small labs need one thing done well: work backwards from the seat date, know which technician has which stage, and see trouble before it becomes a missed delivery. That narrow slice is buildable in a month and the stakes make it an easy sell.

Who pays

The lab owner pays, at $79/month flat for the whole lab. That price is trivial against the cost of losing one dentist account, so the objection is never money, it is habit. Distribution runs through dental lab Facebook groups, the NADL community, and the dentists themselves: the free dentist-facing status page is a viral hook, because a dentist who sees one lab offering live case status starts asking their other labs why they cannot.

MVP scope

• Case entry with restoration type, seat date, and automatic schedule-back stage planning
• Technician stage queues with one-tap completion and a lateness dashboard
• Printable barcode case slips with scan-to-open
• Tokenised dentist status pages plus Postmark ship notifications
• Stripe subscription billing with a 14-day trial
• Skip for v1: invoicing, shade photos, DICOM/scan file handling, multi-location labs, and any dentist login system

Build LabTrack, a case management web app for small dental labs. Stack: Next.js (App Router), Supabase (Postgres, auth, storage), Postmark for email, Stripe for billing.

Core flow: a lab admin creates a case with dentist, patient reference, restoration type (crown, bridge, denture, night guard), shade, and the patient's seat date. The app schedules backwards from the seat date using a per-restoration-type stage template (e.g. crown: model work, design, mill, porcelain, glaze, QC, ship) and assigns each stage a due date and a technician. Technicians see a queue of their stages and tap to mark complete; anything late turns red on the dashboard.

Pages: dashboard (cases by urgency), case detail with stage timeline, technician queue, dentist directory, settings, billing. Each case generates a printable case slip with a Code 128 barcode; scanning it with a USB scanner on any page jumps straight to that case. Each dentist gets a tokenised read-only status page (no login) listing their in-progress cases and ship dates, so they stop phoning.

Non-obvious details: schedule-back must skip weekends and lab-defined holidays; store an audit log of every stage transition with user and timestamp. Postmark sends the dentist an email when a case ships with tracking number.

Pricing: 14-day trial, then $79/month flat per lab via Stripe Checkout, unlimited cases and technicians.