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.

Styles and variants

A vendor style comes in more than one variant — the same design in 14K yellow, 18K white, size 6, size 7. A variant is one thing you can actually put on a purchase order, and it carries its own vendor SKU, cost, prices, metal weight, and photo.

• The style is the design: photo, description, category, setting, side stones. It holds no metal, no cost and no price of its own — those describe a particular variant, and a design bought in three metals has three of each. It’s identified by its vendor + style number; the same number from a different vendor is a different style.
• A variant holds what differs: metal (purity + color), size or length, finish, and what center stone the mounting takes.
• An inventory item is one physical unit of one variant.

The variant’s style # is the number a real piece carries. Make an item from the 18K white variant of R300 — or receive one on a purchase order — and the item’s Style # is R300W, not R300. That’s what you see in the Style # column on the inventory list, in search, and in the reports. R300 names the design; R300W names the thing in the case. That’s why every variant needs its own number, and why a design can’t be created without one.

No variant is the “main” one. They’re peers — the first one you happen to buy doesn’t represent the design any more than the others do. That’s why the catalog list shows a style’s metals together and its price as a from figure when the variants differ.

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 variant: “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 style — two identical rings with different diamonds in them are one variant and two items.

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, and the item’s spec becomes its first variant, under the style # you typed.
   • Style # you’ve used before with that vendor → the item joins that style. A metal, size, finish or center-stone spec you haven’t stocked before becomes a new variant; one you already have simply links to the existing variant as a restock.

Save as Style is greyed out on an item that’s already a unit of a variant — that piece came out of the catalog, so 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 design — “Women’s Diamond Huggie Earrings” — without the metal, because every variant of it shares that description and each one supplies its own metal. Edit it or regenerate it with AI whenever you like.

You can also create a style by hand with + New on the Style Catalog, and add or remove variants yourself — the automatic path is the default, not the only one.

A new style is created together with its first variant, in one Save — the design on its own isn’t something you can order or make. Fill in the design, then the First variant section below it: its metal and its style # are required, and the style # is pre-filled with the design’s, since most designs have exactly one variant and then the two numbers really are the same. Change it to R300Y or R300W if you use a per-metal convention.

Working with variants

A style is one page: the design at the top, and its variants listed underneath. Each row is one thing you can put on a purchase order.

• Click a row to edit that variant — its metal, size, finish, center-stone spec, vendor SKU, cost, prices and which of the style’s photos represents it.
• Clone on a row is the fast way to add the next metal. It copies the whole spec into a new variant so you only type what differs — change the colour or the purity, give it its own style #, save. On a house design its recipe lines come across too, so the clone is costed from the moment you save it rather than arriving with no metal. It doesn’t copy the style # (two variants can’t share one), 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 the clone’s metal line, in the Costing section.
• + Add variant creates one from scratch. Its metal and its style # are required — the metal is what makes it a distinct variant, and the style # is what its items will carry. A second variant starts with a blank number on purpose: once R300 has two, giving both of them “R300” would put the same number on both of their items and you’d be back to not being able to tell them apart in stock.
• Delete variant is in the same drawer. A variant that’s already on an inventory item or an order line can’t be deleted. Deleting one takes the recipe lines aimed at it — its metal, its casting — with it; the lines that apply to all variants stay, because they belong to the design.

A variant’s style # settles once something carries it. While it has no stock, you can rename it freely. The moment an item is made or received under that number, the field goes read-only — 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 variant, 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.

Deleting a whole style is on the style page. It’s 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, everything that belonged to the design goes with it: its variants and its costing recipe. Those aren’t records in their own right; a variant of a design that no longer exists means nothing.

• + Create item on a row stocks that exact variant.

Variants aren’t named. A variant is described by what makes it different — 18K White Gold · Size 7 · Matte — composed from its own spec, so it can never drift from what it actually is. What it does carry is a style # of its own: your convention on a house design (R300 becoming R300Y and R300W), or the vendor’s item number on a vendor style.

Cost and prices are the variant’s own. There’s no style-level default to inherit from, because a design bought in 14K and 18K genuinely has two costs. On a vendor style you type them; on a house design they’re rolled up from the recipe (see below).

The three cross-flows

Once a style exists, three places in the app can pull from it:

1. Adding inventory from a style

+ Create item on a variant row builds the item from that variant — its metal, size, finish, cost, prices and style # — plus the style’s 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 style from the From Style field. If that style comes in several variants, the design fills in but the metal and pricing are left blank rather than guessed — go to the style and use + Create item on the row you mean.

2. Purchase orders by style

On a Purchase Order, you can add a line by style. The line carries the style’s default cost and description; on receipt, JewelTrak creates the matching inventory items already linked to the style.

3. Vendor invoices receiving against a style

When a vendor invoice arrives for goods you ordered by style, the receiving step automatically creates inventory items from the style + the actual quantities and costs on the invoice.

Ordering from the catalog

Orders live on the Orders tab of the Style Catalog — the same place you receive them. An order is a purchase order to one supplier, listing styles and quantities; it stays open until every piece has been received, and receiving turns the received pieces into inventory items that carry the ordered variant’s style # so they trace back to the design.

Two kinds of style

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. A house design has variants exactly as a vendor style does — the same design in 14K yellow, 14K white, platinum — and each one carries its own variant style # (R300 becoming R300Y and R300W, if that’s your convention). That’s the number its items go into stock under.

Costing a house design

A design’s cost is its recipe — the Costing section, one set of lines covering everything the piece is made of:

• 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.
• Stones — carat × price per carat, or price per stone × count, which is how melee is actually bought.
• Labor — a flat amount, minutes × an hourly rate, per stone set, or a rate per unit of metal for casting.
• Other — a flat amount, or a % uplift for shop overhead.

A piece made of two metals gets two metal lines. A silver body with gold accents is one variant carrying 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 variant’s total metal weight is the sum of its lines, and that’s what lands on an item you make from it.

Metal lines belong to a variant, because weight is per variant — the 18K and the 14K of one design don’t weigh the same. Weigh each one the first time you make it. Until a variant has a metal line, its metal costs nothing — that’s on purpose: a guessed metal weight is the most expensive wrong number in a catalogue. And a metal you haven’t priced costs nothing either, which the Costing card tells you by name rather than quietly showing $0.

Casting labor is a line, not part of the metal rate. Set it to a rate per unit of metal and name the metal it’s charged on — casting the gold in a gold-and-silver piece, not the silver. A design that isn’t cast simply has no casting line.

Each line says what it applies to. Most of a piece is the same whichever metal it’s cast in — the melee, the setting labor, the polish — so those lines apply to all variants and you enter them once. Only metal and casting are always targeted at a single variant, because they scale with what that variant weighs; any other line can be targeted too, when it genuinely differs (platinum is harder to work, so it can carry its own bench premium).

A new house design starts with a blank Polish line. Almost every piece carries a polish/finishing cost and it’s the easiest one to forget, so the recipe seeds it for you — fill in its amount, or delete the line on a design that isn’t polished.

Each variant’s cost is then the lines that apply to it, shown read-only on its row: to change it, change the recipe.

Prices are not part of a style. When you make an item from a variant, your price multipliers set its retail and price levels from its cost — the same rule that prices every other item in JewelTrak. That’s how a style you create here should work, and normally you’ll leave the variant’s Retail field blank.

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 style flow through to every item created from it. Update the style photo and you’ve updated all future items in one place.
• Photos belong to the style; a variant points at one of them, so rose and yellow can each show their own shot. Worth doing where the metal colour actually looks different — not for every size.
• A style is not a price list. The retail price on an inventory item is calculated at item-creation time using your current multipliers — changing a variant’s price later doesn’t retroactively reprice existing inventory.