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GarmentFlow keeps your shared reference data — the fabrics, accessories, colors, body parts, units, and categories your are built from — under a single Masters area so every , , and downstream draws on the same records, not on free-text descriptions that drift from one document to the next. Each catalog is small on its own; what they share is the role they play. A fabric named on a BOM is the same record a PO buys from. A color picked into a is the same one a customer sees on the quotation. A unit set against a fabric is the unit the cost sheet quotes in. Get the catalogs right once and the records flow through every downstream document.

Watch how materials defined once in the master catalogs get reused across every BOM, cost sheet, and purchase order.

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What master catalogs are

The platform holds nine master catalogs:
  • Fabrics — your fabric items, with mill, category, unit, and lead time.
  • Accessories — your trims and accessories, with supplier, category, unit, and lead time.
  • Colors — your shared color list.
  • Body Parts — the curated list of garment body parts your team aligns on.
  • Units of Measure — the units quantities are recorded in.
  • Fabric Categories — how fabrics are grouped (woven, knit, denim, and similar).
  • Accessory Categories — how accessories are grouped (buttons, zippers, labels, and similar).
  • Currencies — the list of currencies you tag vendors with.
  • Couriers — the list of express companies you tag on the Parcel Log.
The first seven are reached through the Masters hub: each catalog opens to a list with Search, a Show inactive toggle, an Add button to create a new record, and per-row Edit and remove actions. Cross-cutting behavior — the Translate action that keeps a record bilingual, and how Deactivate and the X icon work — sits at the foot of this page. Currencies and Couriers are tenant-scoped lists too, but they ship with sensible defaults out of the box and do not yet have a Masters-hub editor; your administrator can adjust them if your team needs different entries. Set the catalogs up before your first style. The setup sequence walks through the right order — units and colors before vendors, vendors before materials — and the Data Import wizard loads any of them in bulk.

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Fabrics

The fabric record is the canonical entry for each fabric you source. Visible on the Create and Edit screens:
  • Item No. — your identifier for the fabric.
  • Name — the record’s display name, kept as the original single-language string for older imports.
  • Name (English) and Name (Chinese) — the bilingual name pair; each is optional individually (see Bilingual names and translation).
  • Vendor — the fabric mill this item buys from; set up your vendor list before adding fabrics by hand.
  • Category — one entry from Fabric Categories.
  • Unit — one entry from Units of Measure.
  • Weave — free text, such as plain, twill, or interlock.
  • Lead Time (days) — the supplier’s quoted lead time, in days.
A fabric record feeds the BOM’s fabric lines (which pick from this catalog), the cost sheet (via Copy from BOM), fabric purchase orders (vendor, item number, lead time, and the unit cost captured at BOM approval), and the on-hand fabric stock list. The fabric record also carries spreadsheet-level fields — width, GSM, MOQ, the standard cost, and similar — that you load through the bulk import rather than the on-screen form. For the full list see Importing master data.

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Accessories

The accessory record has the same shape as a fabric, minus Weave:
  • Item No. — your identifier for the accessory.
  • Name — the display name; same legacy/bilingual role as on a fabric.
  • Name (English) and Name (Chinese) — the bilingual name pair.
  • Vendor — the accessory supplier.
  • Category — one entry from Accessory Categories.
  • Unit — one entry from Units of Measure.
  • Lead Time (days) — the supplier’s quoted lead time, in days.
An accessory record feeds the BOM’s accessory lines, the cost sheet (via Copy from BOM), trim and accessory purchase orders, trim submissions, and inventory.

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Colors

The colors catalog is the shared color list — the tenant colour palette your styles’ colorways are built from. Each row carries:
  • Code — your color code.
  • Name (English) — required.
  • Name (Chinese) — optional.
Colors feed each style’s colorway list, the BOM line’s Body colorway entries, and the customer-facing colorway listings on quotations, PIs, and orders. A color you no longer offer can be deactivated without disturbing the colorways that already named it.

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The colour picker on style and order modals

Wherever a user picks a colour for a style today, the Colorways picker reads from this catalog. Existing palette entries appear as chips you select from, and an inline + Add colour affordance lets you add a new colour without leaving the form: type the new name and an optional code, click “Add colour”, and the entry is saved to this catalog and selected on the style in one step. The palette grows from real use, and two coordinators picking the same colour name on different styles land on the same row instead of creating two free-text duplicates. The picker is on the Create style form and on the order’s Add style, Add color, and Edit color modals — every place a user picks a colour onto a style for the first time, or replaces one on an order. Two surfaces still take colours as free text rather than through the picker:
  • The Colorways card on the style detail page is the editor for the per-colorway hex value, optional Pantone reference, display order, and per-colorway thumbnail. Those fields are not on the palette, so editing there is by hand. A colorway added on this card is a per-style record rather than a palette pick.
  • The colour rows shown on a quotation read as text labels carried in from the upstream style and order, not as picker selections.
Both keep working alongside the palette. New colour selection lands in this catalog whenever the picker is in play.

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Body Parts

The Body Parts catalog is the shared reference list of garment body parts — front, back, sleeve, and similar — that your team aligns on. Each row carries:
  • Code — the body part code (e.g. FRONT, BACK, SLEEVE).
  • Name (English) — required.
  • Name (Chinese) — optional.
The catalog stands as the curated vocabulary the workspace builds around. The BOM line’s Body part field is a free-text input today (BOM — Lines); the catalog is the list your team types from.

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Units of Measure

The units catalog is the small list of measures every quantity field reads:
  • Code — the unit code, such as YDS, MTR, PCS, or KGS.
  • Description — free-text description of the unit. Optional.
Units feed every quantity field in the system: the BOM line’s Unit and Qty per piece, the cost sheet’s Unit and Purchase unit, the fabric and accessory record’s default Unit, purchase-order quantities, and inventory.

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Fabric Categories

The fabric categories catalog groups your fabrics into a small set your team uses to navigate them:
  • Code — the category code, such as WOVEN, KNIT, or DENIM.
  • Description — free-text description. Optional.
A fabric record requires a category, so the categories you use should exist before you create fabrics by hand. The bulk import is more forgiving: a fabric row that names a category code not yet in the catalog mints the category on the fly, so you don’t have to pre-create the list when you onboard (Importing master data — Minted on reference).

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Accessory Categories

The accessory categories catalog plays the same role for trims and accessories:
  • Code — the category code, such as BUTTON, ZIPPER, or LABEL.
  • Description — free-text description. Optional.
Same auto-mint behavior on import.

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Currencies

The currencies catalog is the per-tenant list of currencies you can tag a vendor with — the values that fill the Currency dropdown when you create or edit a vendor record. Each row carries:
  • Code — the ISO currency code, such as USD, TWD, EUR, CNY, or JPY. Stored on the vendor’s Currency field.
  • Name (English) — the spelled-out currency name (for example, US Dollar, New Taiwan Dollar).
  • Name (Chinese) — the Chinese-language name (for example, 美元, 新台幣). Optional.
The dropdown shows the Code next to the English or Chinese name depending on the user’s language; the value stored on the vendor is always the Code. A workspace ships with a baseline list — USD, TWD, EUR, CNY, and JPY — and your administrator may extend it if you trade in further currencies. A row you no longer use can be deactivated without disturbing the vendors already tagged with it. The currencies catalog is separate from foreign exchange. It fills the vendor billing-currency dropdown and nothing else: the FX rate table carries its own managed currencies list, the workspace base currency is set when your account is provisioned, and the currency on a vendor invoice reads off the originating document. The currencies catalog does not feed any of them. See Foreign exchange for how multi-currency money actually flows, and Finance ledger for how base and foreign currencies sit alongside each other in reporting.

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Couriers

The couriers catalog is the per-tenant list of express companies you can tag on the Parcel Log — the values that fill the Express company dropdown when you record an inbound or outbound parcel (see Shipments for the related shipment-level fields). Each row carries:
  • Code — the courier code, such as DHL, FedEx, SF Express, or UPS. Stored on the parcel log’s Express company field.
  • Name (English) — the spelled-out courier name.
  • Name (Chinese) — the Chinese-language name (for example, 順豐 for SF Express, 郵局 for the local post office). Optional.
A workspace ships with a baseline list — DHL, FedEx, SF Express, UPS, TNT, the local post office, and Other — and your administrator may adjust it to match the carriers your team actually uses.

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Bilingual names and translation

GarmentFlow keeps two equivalent names side by side on every master that travels through customer-facing documents, so the same record reads correctly to an English-speaking buyer and a Chinese-speaking factory — without anyone re-keying it on the other side. Fabrics, Accessories, Colors, and Body Parts all carry the bilingual pair today. The plain Name field — on Fabrics and Accessories — is the original single-language name the record was created or imported with, kept on the record so older entries still display the way your team has always seen them. Name (English) and Name (Chinese) are the bilingual pair you fill in when you have both languages. Each side is optional on its own — a record can carry one language to begin with — and you can fill the other side later. Translate fills the missing language for you. Open a Fabric or an Accessory in Edit mode and a Translate button sits on each of the two language fields: click it, and GarmentFlow’s translation assistant drafts the equivalent name and inserts it into the field as an editable draft. The drafted name lands in the field directly so you can review, tweak, and save it in one motion. You stay in control of the wording; the assistant takes the typing off your hands. The Translate hint says it plainly: “Translate fills the missing language as an editable draft — review and correct it before it is used in customer documents.” The point is not that the AI is unreliable — it is that you sign off on what goes out under your name. A record can go bilingual in one click; the review keeps the words yours. Translate is on Fabrics and Accessories. Colors, Body Parts, Currencies, and Couriers also carry the bilingual pair, but you fill them by hand — they are short, curated lists you only edit a handful of times. Wherever a master appears on a customer-facing document — the cost sheet’s audience-tailored exports, the BOM as displayed on a PO, the colorway list on a quotation — the bilingual name is what flows through. The cost-sheet export, for example, can be downloaded with English or Chinese column labels for the factory and internal audiences; the values you saved stay as you entered them, and the language toggle picks which side reads.

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Active and inactive

Every catalog row has an active/inactive state, so you can prune a list without disturbing the documents that already named a row.
  • Deactivate hides a row from future selections, with a confirmation prompt. A deactivated row shows an Inactive badge under the Show inactive toggle, and Reactivate brings it back into the selection list.
  • The X icon next to a row removes it from the list.
In both cases, records that already captured this row’s identity — a BOM line’s captured supplier, item number, and lead time at approval; a cost sheet’s captured supplier and item code at Copy from BOM; a PO line’s captured unit price — keep their captured copies. Historical documents still read correctly; the catalog change applies to future picks.