The Cost of an Unsearchable Stash
A serious bead stash starts out manageable — a few tubes of Miyuki 15/0, some Toho 11/0 rounds, a handful of Czech Charlottes you picked up at a show. Three years later it is 200+ labelled bags in three storage towers, and you cannot remember whether the transparent AB you need for the current peyote project is a 10/0 or an 11/0, whether it came from the Czech manufacturer or a Japanese source, and whether you have 10g left or 30g. You pull six candidates out, hold them under the task light, and pick the one that looks right.
This is how hours disappear. The search-by-memory workflow fails the moment the stash outgrows what fits on a single shelf. A catalogued database does not replace the physical stash — it makes the physical stash navigable.
The Anatomy of a Complete Bead Record
The Shape field is the primary taxonomic variable in any serious collection. The template covers: Rocaille (the standard round), Charlotte (the single-cut with one flat facet), True Cut, 2-Cut, 3-Cut, Bugle, Delica, and an Others/free-text fallback. These are not interchangeable. A Charlotte 13/0 and a standard 13/0 Rocaille appear similar in the tube but behave very differently under tension in a ladder stitch — the single facet on the Charlotte creates micro-reflections that disappear when you substitute a Rocaille. If your inventory collapses both into "small round beads," you will discover the substitution after completing two inches of a band.
The Opacity field deserves more attention than most catalogs give it. Transparent, Translucent, and Opaque are three structurally different light behaviors. A transparent AB aurora borealis bead in 11/0 will read completely differently on a black foundation versus a white one — the backing colour shows through and shifts the apparent hue. An opaque bead reads identically on both. When you are colour-matching across a complex pattern with multiple bead sources, the opacity classification is what lets you predict whether two beads that look identical in the tube will look identical in the finished piece.
The Finish/Coating field is where the specific surface treatment lives: lustre, rainbow, matte, satin, silver-lined, galvanised, colour-lined, gilt-lined. A silver-lined crystal is not the same as a colour-lined crystal. A matte galvanised gold will dull differently over time than a high-gloss galvanised. These distinctions matter for long-term colour stability in wearable pieces.
Tracking the Purchase Thread
The procurement fields — Purchase From, Purchase Date, Purchase Order Number, Purchase Item Code — are the fields that feel like paperwork until the day you need to reorder. You had 28g of a specific transparent Montana blue 11/0 Toho that you sourced from a specialty importer. The project you are mid-way through needs 15g more. If the item code is in the record, the reorder takes four minutes. If it is not, you spend an hour on a supplier's website trying to match what you are holding under a lamp to a thumbnail photo.
Weight in Grams and Hanks are the two inventory quantity units that actually matter for different purchase formats. Tube and gram-weight purchases track in grams. Strand and hank purchases — common for certain Czech bead formats sold by the hank of 12 strings — track in hanks. Having both fields means the record accurately reflects how the bead arrived and how you should think about remaining quantity.
The Photo field is the one that makes the database genuinely fast to use at the bench. A thumbnail of the actual bead in good light, photographed on a consistent white background, gives you visual confirmation in half a second when you are scanning search results. The record with a photo gets found. The one without it gets passed over.
The Notes field carries the things no dropdown will ever capture: "lighter than it looks in the photo — closer to periwinkle than true cobalt," "Charlotte cut is uneven — check before using in even-count peyote," "discontinued colourway, last I can find."