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GarmentFlow v5 reorganizes the platform around the style, builds a faster commercial flow, brings production into one hub, splits the shipment record from the carrier document, schedules backward from the customer’s ship date, and lets your administrator tune which optional capabilities are on. This page frames each change as a benefit, so you can see what’s in it for you whether you’re already running GarmentFlow or evaluating it. If you read one concept first, make it the style-centric model — it’s the idea the rest of v5 builds on.

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GarmentFlow records what your team writes

Before the sections below, hold one frame in mind: GarmentFlow is the record of what your team types. The platform does not observe physical movement, does not know where goods physically are, and does not control who picks them up or where they go. Every balance, every status, every shipment “leg” is a book entry the team writes — and the numbers you see are always consistent with what was actually received, issued, and shipped on those records. See Purchasing, receipts, and inventory for the inventory ledger and Shipments for the same frame on the outbound side.

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Build a style once, reuse it across every order

In v5, the is the system of record for its , its , its fitting history, and its . What this means for you: you create a style’s documents once. When the same style comes back next season, you reuse it instead of rebuilding it. Each order that runs the style works against its own approved version of the BOM and cost sheet, and that version is pinned to the order — so two orders on the same style can evolve and be approved separately without stepping on each other. Every change is captured as an , so you always know which version a given order is running. Fitting is now per-style too: one validation record takes a style from first proto through to a sample approved for bulk, and the same approval serves every order that reuses the style. This replaces the older order-centric approach, where the same product had to be re-entered for every order and there was no shared product record to reuse.

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Quote, convert, and order on one connected chain

v5 rebuilds the commercial front of the system on a single documents and conversion chain. A becomes a becomes an order — each step carries the line items forward instead of asking you to retype them. What this means for you: quoting is faster and more consistent, the numbers you quoted flow into the documents that follow, and customer-facing PDFs are generated for you with your company’s branding and terms. Customer-facing documents — the quotation and the proforma invoice — only ever carry the prices the customer is party to, while the cost sheet behind them can be exported separately for factory, customer, or internal audiences. And AI can produce a starting draft of a quotation, proforma invoice, or cost sheet for you to review and approve, so you begin from a worked draft instead of a blank page. See Readiness engine and AI for where AI fits.

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Run production from one hub

v5 brings subcontracting, purchasing, inventory, and quality claims together in a single Production hub, organized into four tabs:
  • Subcontracting — a single can cover several customer orders and styles at once, each with its own factory price, and can be converted into a signed contract.
  • Purchasing — when you raise for the materials a style needs, the platform reads the order’s approved BOM and seeds one draft purchase order per vendor with the order’s quantity for that line and the unit price captured from the approved cost sheet. Buying is against real demand, not a blank form.
  • Inventory — your administrator may enable balance views for materials and finished goods. When they’re on, every balance is calculated from a running record of receipts, issues, and returns — always consistent with what was actually received and issued, with no hand-typed counts to keep in sync.
  • Claims — your administrator may enable claims tracking. When it’s on, you track material and garment quality claims with photos, start to close.
What this means for you: the operational heart of an OEM business is in one place, with the order, the factory work, the materials, and the stock balances all reading from the same records.

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Ship and book the carrier as two separate things

v5 splits the shipment side into two records that work together. The outbound shipment is the per-leg operational record on the order — auto-seeded when the factory order is issued, and the record whose shipped status draws the finished-goods record down. The commercial shipment is the customer-facing document for the batch — vessel or flight, bill of lading or air waybill, carrier, and the link to the commercial invoice — created by hand when the team is ready to book the carrier. What this means for you: the team’s operational record of the leg and the customer-facing document for the batch each get their own record, so the per-leg work doesn’t have to wait on the carrier booking and the customer-facing document doesn’t have to carry per-leg internals. See Shipments.

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Schedule backward from the ship date

v5 schedules production and material targets backward from the customer’s ship date, using your own lead-time offsets, so each milestone has a target date that lands the shipment on time. The then watches what’s missing inside each stage, not just what’s done, and flags anything slipping before it derails the ship date. Your administrator may enable a material-arrival check on the cutting milestone of a factory order: when the BOM materials for that order haven’t been received, the milestone shows a red gate with the per-line shortfall — with the option to override and record a reason when you need to proceed anyway. What this means for you: you see what has to happen by when to hit the ship date, and — if the material gate is on — the system helps prevent starting production before the materials it depends on are in.

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Tune the workspace to how your team works

The platform ships with a single Feature settings panel where an administrator turns optional capabilities on and off and edits shared presets that apply across your whole workspace. The inventory views, the claims module, receipts tracking, the material-arrival check, and the proforma-invoice step in the conversion chain are all workspace-tunable from there. What this means for you: the workspace fits how your team actually works, without turning every capability on by default. See Feature settings for the panel and the capabilities it controls.

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Onboard in hours, not weeks

v5 adds a guided Data Import tool that bulk-imports your master data — customers, vendors, fabrics, trims, colors, and units — from spreadsheet files. It validates every row before saving, so a file either imports cleanly or tells you exactly which rows to fix, and it never overwrites data you’ve already entered. What this means for you: getting a new workspace ready is a matter of importing your existing lists, not entering everything by hand.