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A ’s documents — its bill of materials and its cost sheet — are living records that change over time and are shared across many orders. This page explains how they’re structured and how versioning lets one style serve many orders without conflict. This builds on the style-centric model: these documents belong to the style, not to any one order.

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The BOM: the authoritative material list

A style’s (bill of materials) is the definitive list of what the style is made from. It has two parts:
  • Fabrics — the main materials.
  • Trims — the buttons, zips, labels, and other accessories.
Each line records more than the material itself: its supplier, its position on the garment, its procurement status, and the the line applies to. A trim used only on the navy version, for instance, is assigned to that colorway so the right materials are bought for the right colors. The BOM is the single source of truth that purchasing and manufacturing both read — when buyers raise purchase orders and the factory receives its manufacturing order, the materials come from here.

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The cost sheet: the financial view of the BOM

The is the money side of the same material picture. You build it from the BOM — a “copy from BOM” step seeds the cost lines with the item codes and positions already entered, so you don’t retype the material list. From there the cost sheet does the costing:
  • Each line carries a factory cost — what you pay to make or buy that item.
  • A per-line customer multiplier turns factory cost into the customer price. Set the multiplier and the customer figure is calculated for you — never typed in by hand, never left inconsistent.
  • The difference between the two, summed across the sheet, is your margin.
Because the customer price is derived rather than stored, a change to a factory cost flows through to the customer price and the margin automatically. The cost sheet is what feeds your pricing when you quote a customer.

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What an artifact version is

A style’s BOM and cost sheet don’t sit still — materials get swapped, costs get renegotiated, a colorway is added. GarmentFlow captures each meaningful revision as an : a numbered snapshot of a document at a point in time. When you change a BOM or a cost sheet, saving creates a new version rather than overwriting the old one. Version 1 stays exactly as it was; your edits become version 2. You can switch back to view any earlier version, and you can always see which version is the current one. This works the same way across a style’s documents — the BOM, the cost sheet, and the other style documents all version uniformly, so the behavior you learn on one tab works on all of them.

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Why versions exist: many orders, one style

Versioning is what makes the style-centric model safe. A single style can run on many at once — a spring order and an autumn reorder, perhaps — and each order may need the style built or costed slightly differently. Each order runs a specific version of the style’s BOM and cost sheet. So:
  • Revising the BOM for the autumn order creates a new version for that order; the spring order keeps running the version it was built on, undisturbed.
  • You can see exactly which version each order is using.
  • The full history of every change is preserved, not overwritten.
One shared style, many orders, no collisions — because each order is pinned to its own version.

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The approval flow

A version is a working draft until it’s approved. Approval happens per order: before production and purchasing proceed for an order, that order’s version of the BOM is approved, marking it final for that order. Because approval is per order, the same style can be approved independently for different orders — the spring order’s BOM can be locked and in production while the autumn order’s is still being revised. Approval is the signal downstream steps wait for. Purchase orders are raised and a is issued against the approved version, so your buyers and the factory always work from a BOM that’s been signed off — never a half-finished draft.