Your first order

This is the end-to-end walkthrough: one order, from the first product record to the shipped goods and the invoice. We’ll follow a single example all the way through — a women’s quilted jacket your customer wants for the autumn season — so each step builds on the last exactly as it will in your own workspace. Every step links to the module guide that covers it in depth. Follow those links when you want the detail; this page keeps to the through-line.

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Step 1 — Set up your masters

Every order draws on shared reference data, so this goes in first. Your customers, vendors, fabrics, trims, colors, and units are the building blocks the rest of the system references. If you’re an administrator on a fresh workspace, work through setting up your tenant and, to load lists in bulk, importing master data. If you’ve joined an existing workspace, this is already done — pick up at step 2. For our jacket you’ll need the customer on file, the shell fabric and the zip in your material catalogs, and at least one color.

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Step 2 — Create the style

The style is the reusable product record everything else hangs off. The jacket becomes a style once and is reused every season it returns. In the Styles module, choose “Create style”. The style number is generated for you. Fill in the jacket’s details — the Brand, the Customer style no. and name your buyer uses, the Season, and Gender — and save. The style opens on its detail page, with tabs for the BOM, cost sheet, sample history, and the rest of the design’s artifacts. See the Styles module guide.

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Step 3 — Build the BOM

The BOM lists what the jacket is made from — everything downstream reads it. Open the BOM tab. Add a fabric line for the shell and a trim line for the zip, record each line’s supplier and details, and assign the vendor. Save. Saving captures the BOM as its first artifact version, so later changes never overwrite this one. More in the Styles guide.

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Step 4 — Complete the cost sheet

The cost sheet turns the BOM into a costed price — what you’ll quote from. On the Cost Sheet tab, use “Copy from BOM” to seed the cost lines, then set each unit cost. Set the customer multiplier and GarmentFlow derives the customer price and shows your margin, so you quote on real numbers. The cost sheet is the costing tool you’ll keep open when you quote. See BOM, cost sheet, and artifact versions.

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Step 5 — Validate the jacket through fitting

Fitting proves the jacket is right before any bulk commitment. In the Fitting module, start a record for the jacket and work it through its stages, recording comments, measurements, and photos at each. Each fitting round refines the sample until it’s right. When the pre-production sample is signed off, the style is validated and ready to commit to an order. See samples and fitting.

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Step 6 — Create the quotation

The quotation puts a price in front of the customer. In the Quotations module, choose “Create quotation”, pick the customer, and add a line for the jacket — its colorways, sizes, quantities, and the unit price from your cost sheet. Export the quotation as a PDF, branded as your own document, and send the quotation. When the customer accepts, mark it approved — the quotation moves Draft → Sent → Approved. See Create a quotation.

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Step 7 — Convert to a PI, then to an order

The accepted quote carries forward, so nothing is retyped. From the accepted quotation, generate a proforma invoice for the customer to arrange payment — a step your administrator enables — then convert the quotation into an order. Both conversions carry the line items, colorways, quantities, and prices forward. On the new order, set the Ship date, Trade term, and Destination. See the Orders module guide and the documents and conversion chain.

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Step 8 — Read the backward schedule

Once the ship date is set, every milestone gets a deadline. Open the order’s schedule. GarmentFlow works backward from your ship date — through inspection, materials received, documents issued, fabric shipped, and order confirmed — and shows each milestone with its target date on a schedule timeline. The readiness engine compares progress against those targets and flags anything slipping. See the readiness engine. Confirm the order on the commercial side so the rest of the team can plan against a real deal, and approve the jacket’s BOM for this order so production can read it as final. Production starts as a separate step in the next section.

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Step 9 — Outsource production and buy materials

The jacket is made at a factory from purchased materials — and production shouldn’t start until those materials arrive. In the Production hub, raise a factory order on the Subcontracting tab for the factory making the jacket, then raise purchase orders on the Purchasing tab for the shell fabric and the zip. As materials arrive, record each receipt against its purchase order. Issuing the factory order also auto-seeds the per-leg outbound shipment skeleton you’ll work in step 11. If your administrator has enabled the material-arrival check, production start is held back until coverage is met — with the per-line shortfall shown in red and an override-with-reason path when you need to proceed anyway. See the Production module guide.

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Step 10 — Issue the manufacturing order

With the BOM approved and materials in, the factory needs one frozen production document. On the jacket’s MO tab, issue the manufacturing order. The MO is a multi-tab factory workbook — the order quantities, the approved BOM’s per-colorway color-spec, the finalised grading grid, the sample-stage measurement comparison, and the customer’s brand-tab library attachments (packing, production notes, sample review, style detail) — rendered from one of the workspace’s PMS templates. Issuing freezes the content so production always works from a stable copy, even if a source record changes later. See Build a manufacturing order (MO).

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Step 11 — Ship and invoice

The finished jackets go to the customer, and the sale is billed and tracked to payment. The team works two shipment records together. The outbound shipment is the per-leg operational record on the order — auto-seeded in step 9 — and marking it shipped to the order’s shipping destination 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, and the link to the commercial invoice — created by hand when you’re ready to book the carrier. See Shipments. Then raise the customer invoice and track the receipt of payment against the order. If your administrator has enabled receipts tracking, the order’s Overview tab shows a payment-progress bar that fills as money comes in. The jacket order is complete. See Finance.

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What’s next

You’ve taken one jacket from a product record to a paid, shipped order. Each step has a module guide with the full detail: Styles, Quotations, Orders, Samples and fitting, Production, Shipments, and Finance. The next time this jacket comes back, you start at step 6 — the style is already built.

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Related pages

• Styles module guide
• Orders module guide
• Quotations
• Production module guide
• The readiness engine and AI