Guided Setup
A brand-new GarmentFlow site knows nothing about your factory. Guided Setup is the wizard that fixes that — eight steps that take you from an empty site to one that can plan a real order.
You do not have to finish Guided Setup in one sitting, and you do not have to use it at all. Every step is satisfied by the data existing, however it got there: enter your brands by hand and the Brands step is already ticked.
Where to find Guided Setup
Open the GarmentFlow Setup workspace in Desk and choose Guided Setup, or press
Ctrl + K (Cmd + K on a Mac) and type guided setup.
Until setup is finished, a Finish setting up GarmentFlow card also sits at the top of the Production, Design, Logistics and Quality Control workspaces. The card shows how many steps are done and carries a Continue setup button. It removes itself once you press Finish in the wizard. Not now hides the card for you alone, without affecting anyone else.
How the wizard works
Each step of Guided Setup is one screen with the same four parts:
| Part | What it gives you |
|---|---|
| What it is | Plain language, no field names |
| Why it matters | What breaks downstream if you skip it |
| Flow strip | Where this data ends up — Brand → Tech Pack → Batch → Printed label |
| The work itself | Add records, tick what applies, or press an insert button |
Move through the wizard with Next and Back, or jump to any step you have already reached using the rail on the left. A ✓ marks a step whose data exists.
The eight steps
1. Brands — who you make for
A brand is more than a name. Each brand carries the raw materials pulled into every order, the label designs printed with each batch, and the measurement points that seed every new pattern. You can upload a logo per brand in this step.
Set a brand up once and every tech pack, batch and printed label for that brand inherits it. Skip this step and your team re-enters the same trims and redesigns the same labels on every order.
2. Seasons — when you sell it
A season groups everything made for one selling window — a spring/summer range, a winter range, a capsule drop. Tech packs, samples, variants and production orders each tag the season they belong to.
Season is how one range gets compared against another: what sampled well, what shipped late,
what a range actually cost. Each season is stored as a Project, so ERPNext project
reporting works on it too. Name seasons SS or FW followed by the last two digits of the
year — SS27, FW27 — and they sort correctly everywhere.
3. Product Categories — what you make
GarmentFlow ships a full apparel tree — Tops, Bottoms, Outerwear and more. Most factories make one or two of these. Keep what you produce and untick the rest.
Product categories are item groups, and they classify every style you create and drive the pickers your team sees all day. Carrying 35 groups you never use means scrolling past them forever. Your choice is remembered, so removed groups stay removed after an app update, and re-ticking a group brings it back. A group that already has items on it is kept and reported rather than deleted.
4. Costing & Warehouses — how work is priced
Most factories pay operators a monthly wage, but GarmentFlow costs work by the minute, so the two have to be reconciled once. That is what this step does. The wizard can work Cost Per Minute out from monthly salary per operator, hours per day, days per month and an estimated efficiency — or you can type the figure in directly.
Cost Per Minute and Default Minutes per Day are what convert recorded operation time into money and back again, so a wrong figure here is wrong everywhere it is used downstream. Individual Work Centers carry their own Net Hourly Rate for a line that genuinely costs more or less than the factory average.
This step is also where you set the WIP and raw-material warehouses, creating one inline if it does not exist yet, review the seeded operations, and say which of those operations is cutting.
5. Machines — what you run
This step inserts eight asset categories sized for a garment plant: cutting and stitching machinery, IT, material handling, vehicles, furniture, leasehold improvements, and the building itself. Each category carries its own depreciation life.
An asset cannot depreciate until it belongs to a category, and the category decides over how many years. Each category is matched to an account in your chart of accounts; any that had no obvious match are listed in the error log for an accountant to review.
Asset category names are stored in the language you pick in this step. Choose the language before inserting — a saved category name is data, and it will not re-translate later.
Inserting asset categories is safe to repeat: a category that already exists in any language is skipped, never duplicated.
6. Units & Work Centers — where you make it
A Production Unit is a place that does work — your own plant floor, or an external workshop. Work Centers are the individual lines and stations inside a production unit.
Each production unit declares which operations it can perform and how much it can do per day, and that capacity is what production scheduling and the unit-load reports read. Internal units link to a plant floor. External units link to a Supplier and a Default Service Item, which is how subcontract billing posts — the wizard can create the service item for you if you do not have one yet.
7. Operator Skills — what people can do
This step inserts a starter vocabulary of 29 manufacturing skills, each with a description of what a 1, 3 and 5 rating means. The vocabulary is available in English, Spanish, Portuguese and Chinese.
Operator skills are what interviews score, what operator ratings record, and what work-center manning is matched against; without them those features have no vocabulary to work with. You can add your own skills here too, with your own level descriptions. Inserting skills is safe to repeat — existing skills are skipped, never duplicated.
8. Employees — who does the work
Employees are the operators, supervisors and staff who will be assigned to work centers and rated on skills. An employee record links a person to the work they do: the manning on a line, the ratings they earn, and the labour hours costed to a batch.
Only name, company, gender and dates are required in this step. Everything else can be filled in later, and you can attach skills as you go.
Finishing setup
Finish marks Guided Setup complete, which hides the setup card on the workspaces. The wizard itself stays reachable from GarmentFlow Setup — nothing is locked, and returning to a step later is safe.
Progress is not stored as a checklist you can tick off. It is recomputed from your data every time the page loads: brands exist, a season exists, Cost Per Minute is set, a work center exists, and so on. Delete the data and the step un-ticks.
What to do next
Go to GarmentFlow Setup for everything the wizard does not cover, then work through the Implementation Checklist.