Quality tools for regulated manufacturers
Red Hen Dev builds practical software for document control and recordkeeping — the unglamorous work that audits are made of. Free, open-source tools you can run yourself, from a team that lives in FDA QMSR and ISO 13485 every day.
Self-hosted document control for scanned records. Nestbox finds every PDF across your network shares and cloud drives, categorizes them, watches them for changes, flags duplicates, and links each one to the physical box on the shelf — with an append-only audit trail your auditor will actually respect.
Scans network shares, Google Drive, and OneDrive/SharePoint for scanned records and tracks name, date, size, and location — continuously.
Reads the text inside every PDF — including raw scans, via Tesseract — so you can search records by contents, not just file names.
Exact copies caught by content hash — and the same paper document scanned twice caught by text similarity, even when the files differ.
Scheduled scans detect renamed, moved, modified, and missing files — plus weekly integrity checks that catch silent corruption. Review and resolve every alert.
Every record knows which physical box holds the paper original. Print QR labels (Avery stock) that open the record when scanned with a phone.
Every change recorded — who, what, when, old to new. Deletes are rejected by the database itself; records retire or supersede, never vanish. Built for FDA QMSR / ISO 13485 environments.
Your scanner drops the PDF into a watched inbox folder.
Title, project, record type, lot & part number — in one form.
Print a QR label and stick it on the paper original.
Assign the paper copy to a numbered box on a real shelf.
Nestbox moves the PDF to its permanent home and monitors it.
Anywhere Docker runs — Windows, macOS, or Linux. Two files, one command, and your records inventory is live on your own hardware. No account, no telemetry, no per-seat pricing. Your documents never leave your network.
# quick start
mkdir nestbox && cd nestbox
curl -LO https://raw.githubusercontent.com/aebarth/nestbox/main/docker-compose.yml
curl -Lo .env https://raw.githubusercontent.com/aebarth/nestbox/main/.env.example
# edit .env: secret key + your folders, then…
docker compose up -d → open http://localhost:3000 and create your admin account
The system of record for audits & inspections
When the records are under control, the next question is the audits that review them. Candor is our commercial platform for medical-device and other regulated manufacturers: internal audits, external inspections, findings with real ownership, and compliance health you can see — in one place.
Talk to us about Candor
Red Hen Dev is the software side of Red Hen Admin, a consultancy serving regulated manufacturers. We build the tools we wished our clients had — then give the recordkeeping ones away, because good records should not be a luxury.
Questions, ideas, or a stack of boxes that needs taming? Get in touch.