Style Catalog

A style is a reusable design — description, category, setting, side stones, photos — separate from the physical items that live in inventory. Once a style exists, you can stamp out new inventory items, purchase orders, or vendor invoices from it instead of re-typing the same fields.

New in JewelTrak. The legacy app didn’t have a separate Style Catalog — every inventory record was its own snowflake. Styles save real time on items you make or buy repeatedly.

When to use a style

• A vendor sends you the same ring design across multiple orders.
• You manufacture or commission the same piece in multiple sizes / finishes.
• You want consistent descriptions and photos across every instance of that design.

If a piece is a one-off, you don’t need a style — go straight to + New on the inventory list.

What a style is

• The style is the design, and it’s the thing you order, cost and stock: photo, description, category, setting, side stones, and its own metal, size, finish, cost and price. It’s identified by its vendor + style number; the same number from a different vendor is a different style.
• An inventory item is one physical unit of that design.

A design’s style # is the number a real piece carries. Make an item from R300W — or receive one on a purchase order — and the item’s Style # is R300W. That’s what you see in the Style # column on the inventory list, in search, and in the reports.

Style name

Under the style # is an optional Style Name — what you and your customers actually call the design: Enchanted Garden, Passion, one of a kind. Unlike the style #, it isn’t an identifier: a whole family usually shares one name across its metal variants, and you can rename a design at any time without breaking anything that points at it.

It’s worth filling in, because the name is used where the design is described: it shows on the catalog list and grid, and the Generate button on the description feeds it to the AI as a product name, so a generated description can say “the Enchanted Garden bracelet” instead of describing an anonymous piece.

Changed. A style used to sit above a tier of variants — the same design in 14K yellow, 18K white — and the variant was the orderable thing. That tier is gone. A design in two metals is now two designs, related by a design group, which is how shops number them anyway (R300, R300Y, R300W). Nothing was lost in the change: every design in every catalog had exactly one variant, and its number was always the design’s own.

Center stones — two different things

A semi-mount is cut for a particular center stone, and a vendor sells the same design cut for several. That’s a property of the mounting, so it lives on the design: “takes a 10×8 mm elongated cushion” and “takes a 6.5 mm round” are two different things to order, usually at two different costs. Fill in Takes center stone on mountings and semi-mounts, and leave it blank on everything else.

The stone actually set in a finished piece is not that. It belongs to the individual item, on its Stones tab, and is never copied up to the design — two identical rings with different diamonds in them are one design and two items.

Design groups

Shops number related designs in families: R300, R300Y, R300W, R300P are the same ring in different metals, each its own design. A design group is the loose association between them — a name you can search, sort and pivot on. It works the same way on your own house designs and on vendor styles.

A group is deliberately lightweight. Nothing points at a group; a design simply carries the group’s name. That means:

• A group exists for exactly as long as a design is in it. There’s nothing to create up front and nothing to clean up afterwards — take the last design out and the group is gone.
• The name is the identity. Two designs saying R300 are in one group. So there’s no merging to do, and no way to end up with two groups that look the same. Capitalisation doesn’t split a family: r300 joins R300.
• A design belongs to one group.

A design group is not a bridal set. Grouping a ring with its matching band and earrings is a different thing — that’s Add a set on an invoice, and it deliberately spans jewelry types. Design groups are families of the same kind of piece.

Naming a group

JewelTrak proposes the name from what the style numbers already share — group R300Y and R300W and it offers R300, whether or not a bare R300 exists. It’s only ever a proposal: it appears in the box for you to accept, edit or replace, and nothing is applied without you.

If the numbers share nothing (SB550, R64POP, SE4), there’s nothing to propose and you name it yourself. If they share very little, you’ll get a note saying so — R30 and R300 share “R30”, which is usually a mis-selection rather than a family.

If the name you type already exists, you’ll see who is already in it before you commit — “R300 already exists — 4 designs: R300, R300Y, R300W, R300P.” That’s the whole decision: is this the family I meant?

Two ways to build one

1. Copy design on a design page. Copying is how a family usually starts — R300 exists, you begin making it in yellow, so R300Y starts as a copy of it. The copy inherits the original’s group, or, if it doesn’t have one, the shared stem is proposed as you type the new number. Copying brings across the design’s details, its spec, its stones and its costing recipe; photos and video aren’t copied, since a picture belongs to the design that owns it.
2. Select rows on the Style Catalog → Add to group. Tick the designs, click Add to group, and the shared stem is proposed. Selection survives paging and filtering, so a family scattered across several pages can be gathered in one go. Leaving the name blank takes the selected designs out of their group.

Finding the family

The point of a group is that you never have to remember its name. Open any design in the family and the Design Group field shows how big it is — R300 — 4 designs — as a link straight to the rest of them. From the catalog list, the Design Group column does the same on any row. Either way you land on the family filtered, with a chip at the top of the list showing which group you’re in and clearing it in one click.

Search finds groups too, as a backstop. And if a design has no group but its number looks like it belongs to one — you typed R300B by hand and R300 exists — the field offers it rather than leaving the piece stranded outside its family.

Building the catalog from what you buy

You don’t have to sit down and author a catalog — it fills itself in as stock arrives:

1. Enter the piece as an inventory item as usual, giving it a Vendor and a Style # (both are required for the next step).
2. Click Save as Style on the item.
   • New vendor + style # → a vendor style is created from that item: its classification, its spec (metal, size, finish, the center stone it takes), its cost, its photo and its side stones.
   • Style # you’ve used before with that vendor → the item is a unit of that design and simply links to it. The design’s own spec isn’t rewritten by the piece that arrived — a restock in a different finish doesn’t get to redefine the design.

Save as Style is greyed out on an item that already came out of the catalog — there’s nothing to derive from it. It always creates a vendor style; to build one of your own designs, use + New → House design on the Style Catalog.

The style’s description is written from the classification — “Women’s Diamond Huggie Earrings” — rather than copied off the item, because an item description carries its metal and the design’s own text should read as the design. Edit it or regenerate it with AI whenever you like.

You can also create a design by hand with + New on the Style Catalog — the automatic path is the default, not the only one. Two fields are required: the style #, which is its identity and the number its items go into stock under, and its metal (Other Metal covers silver and steel). A design with no metal costs nothing and says nothing about what you’d order.

A new house design has the same Costing tab as a saved one, and you can start costing it straight away: + Add on any panel saves the design first and carries you into the line you were adding. You don’t have to save it yourself and come back. If something required is still blank, you’re taken back to General with the field marked, and nothing is saved.

Working with a design

A design is one page with three tabs: General — everything the design is; Costing — its recipe, on house designs only; and History — every piece ever made from it and what became of each.

Everything on General is the design’s own, saved together: its identity and classification, its specification (gold purity and color, other metal, metal weight, size or length, finish, and the center stone a mounting takes) and its pricing.

• + Create item in the header stocks one. It asks nothing — the piece is a unit of the design, and the design already says what it’s made of.
• Copy design is the fast way to add the next metal. It copies the whole design — spec, stones and costing recipe — so you only type what differs. Give the copy its own style #, and if the metal changed, reweigh it: the same piece in 18K is about 16% heavier than in 14K, so the copied weight would under-cost it. On a house design that weight is on its metal line, in the Costing tab.
• Delete is refused while anything independent still points at the design — inventory items, purchase-order lines, or production jobs — and tells you what’s holding it. Once it goes, its stone spec, its photos and its costing recipe go with it; those aren’t records in their own right.

A style # settles once something carries it. While a design has no stock, you can rename it freely — but once an item exists under that number the field is read-only, because the piece in the case is stamped with it and that stamp isn’t rewritten after the fact. The same is true from the other end: an item’s Style # is read-only once it’s a unit of a design, or once it’s been out on an invoice, memo or appraisal. The window for fixing a typo is before the number has been anywhere.

Cost and prices are the design’s own. On a vendor style you type the cost — it’s what the vendor charges. On a house design it’s rolled up from the recipe and shown read-only (see below).

The two cross-flows

Once a design exists, two places in the app can pull from it:

1. Adding inventory from a design

+ Create item builds the item from the design — its metal, size, finish, cost, prices and style # — plus its description, photos and stones. You then fill in only what’s unique to the physical piece: serial number, exact weight, location.

You can also start from the item side: on Inventory → + New, pick a design from the From Style field.

2. Ordering a design

Orders live on the Orders tab of the Style Catalog — the same place you receive them. An order lists what you’re buying and how many, and it stays open until every piece has arrived.

The fastest way to start one is straight from this list: tick the designs you want and click Reorder (or Reproduce, for your own house designs, which starts a production job instead). Both open a draft you can adjust before sending.

Ticks carry across pages — change page, change a filter, open a design and come back, and your selection is still there, so one order can gather designs from anywhere in the catalog. Tick Show selected only to pull everything you’ve chosen into a single view and check it before you act. The count next to it is always the true total, not just what’s on screen. clear drops the lot, and a completed order clears it for you.

Type or scan the style number and the line resolves itself — the design carries the metal and color, so nothing has to be guessed at the moment the piece is costed.

Receiving is two steps — record what arrived, then add those pieces to inventory and tag them. Goods usually turn up before anyone has time to price them, and splitting it means the cost is pinned on the day they arrive rather than the day you get around to tagging. Full detail in Purchase Orders.

Two kinds of design

You choose the kind on + New, and it’s fixed from then on — it decides how the piece is costed, so it isn’t something to flip later.

Vendor style — a vendor’s design. You type what it costs you, because that’s what the vendor charges.

House design — your own design. It’s costed from what it’s actually made of: the metal it weighs, plus its recipe.

Everything else is the same.

Costing a house design

A design’s cost is its recipe — the Costing tab. There are three panels you add to, and the labor is entered on the thing it’s done to, not in a panel of its own:

• Metal — which metal, and what it weighs. Its cost is that weight at today’s rate for that metal, from Settings → Metals Pricing. So the 18K version genuinely costs more than the 14K one, which a single flat cost could never say. If the metal carries casting labor, that labor is inside the rate, marked with an asterisk.
• Stones — quantity, carat weight, and cost per carat. Pick the category (White Diamonds, Fancy Diamonds, Colored Stones, Pearls) and the stone type follows it, except for colored stones, which ask. Dimensions is usually the melee size, and it’s shown on the row so two melee lines can be told apart. Its Setting column is the labor entered on that line.
• Additional Costs — everything else, costed one of two ways: a flat amount (certification, plating, an outside service) or quantity × cost each (a chain, a clasp, a bail, findings).

The Stones panel totals its carat weight, under the cost total, split into Diamonds and Colored stones — so a design whose stones arrive as three or four lines still tells you at a glance that it carries 17.91 ct of diamonds and 32.40 ct of colored stones, which is the figure you quote, appraise and put in the description. A kind the design doesn’t use isn’t listed, and the weights are there whether or not you can see costs. Pearls are left out on purpose: a pearl is measured in millimetres, not carats, and older records often kept the pearl count in the carat box, so any pearl total would be wrong.

Each list totals itself in a band across its own footer, and the design’s total cost sits once at the top of the tab. The per-panel figures used to be repeated in a strip up there as well, which meant a design’s stone cost could appear three times on one screen.

Casting is entered with the metal it’s charged on. Open a metal line and tick Include labor, then choose how it’s charged: a rate per unit of that metal — the usual way for gold, where the cost scales with weight — or a flat amount for this piece, which is how a shop usually handles silver, cheaper to buy and dearer to make. The drawer shows what the rate lands on as you type it (“8.50 g of 18K × $11.00 = $93.50 labor”). The labor then goes into the rate itself — the Rate column shows the cost per unit with casting in it, marked with an asterisk and a note under the list so you can see at a glance which metals carry labor, and the Cost is that rate at the line’s weight. A design that isn’t cast simply doesn’t tick the box, and its rate is the plain metal rate.

Setting labor is typed in the Setting Labor panel, and it is always stones × a rate. Press + Add and the stone count from the design’s own stone lines is already filled in, so usually the only thing to type is the rate. Change the count if fewer are actually being set, or press Pick stones… to tick which ones and let it add them up. A ring with a center stone at $18 and 42 melee at $2 is two lines: 1 × $18.00 and 42 × $2.00. That’s one place to look for what the setter is charging, and one place to change it.

Changed. For a few weeks setting was priced on each stone line instead, as Setting $/stone. It saved re-typing the count but split one number across two panels, so it’s gone. Existing designs were converted for you — nothing costs a different amount than it did.

Additional Costs is a catch-all, and that’s deliberate. Put what you like in it — plenty of shops keep years of habits there rather than splitting a job across panels, and the total cost is right either way.

A piece made of two metals gets two metal lines. A silver body with gold accents carries 5 dwt of 18K and 250 dwt of silver — each costed at its own rate, which is nothing like charging the whole weight as gold. The design’s total metal weight is the sum of its lines, and that’s what lands on an item you make from it.

Weigh the design the first time you make it. Until it has a metal line, its metal costs nothing — that’s on purpose: a guessed metal weight is the most expensive wrong number in a catalog. And a metal you haven’t priced costs nothing either, which the Costing card tells you by name rather than quietly showing $0.

To change a line, click it. Every row opens its own panel, where its figures and its description are edited together. A blank figure reads as “not applicable” rather than as a $0 somebody typed, and costs nothing — a piece that isn’t cast, or a stone that isn’t set, simply leaves it empty.

Setting lines brought over from an older system are just setting lines. They sit in the same Setting Labor panel, counted exactly as they were entered, and you edit, add to and delete them like any other — there’s nothing to convert and no difference between a line your old system wrote and one you type today.

The design’s cost is then the sum of its lines, shown read-only on the General tab: to change it, change the recipe.

Prices are not part of a design. When you make an item, your price multipliers set its retail and price levels from its cost — the same rule that prices every other item in JewelTrak. Normally you’ll leave the design’s Retail field blank.

Leaving it blank no longer means the design has no price: the catalog list, the house design list and its price list all work it out from the design’s cost through your multiplier, per store, every time they’re shown — so a design you never typed a retail on still prices itself, and it moves with the gold price instead of going stale.

Filling it in pins that retail: the multipliers won’t calculate it and won’t overwrite it. That mostly matters for designs brought over from an older system, which keep the retail they already had (their old markup percentage doesn’t come across — only the resulting price). Cost works the other way round on a house design: it’s rolled up from the recipe and can’t be typed at all.

A house design’s cost is always live. It’s rolled up from the recipe at today’s metal rate every time it’s shown and every time you make an item — so there’s nothing to recompute by hand, and nothing that goes stale when the gold price moves.

Tips

• Photos uploaded to a design flow through to every item created from it. Update the design’s photo and you’ve updated all future items in one place.
• A design is not a price list. The retail price on an inventory item is calculated at item-creation time using your current multipliers — changing a design’s price later doesn’t retroactively reprice existing inventory.