When you press the yellow + button on the top right corner, you will arrive at the item creator form, which consists of the following fields:
Composition
If you want to create a formula/accord (or if you have created a dilution), you can see the items that build it up. Every row contains 4 fields:
Below the consisting items you can see a row called bottle. It is optional, but it is useful to measure the bottle in advance, because if you remove some of the accord, you can make sure your composition percentages remain the same when you add new items. We'll come back to this later.
Above the units column, you can see a number which is the sum of the units used by the consisting items.
If an item doesn't have consisting items, it's a core material.
Name
The name of the item. It is required to be able to identify the item you created.
Description (optional)
The description of the item. It is not required, but a good place to describe the item, or take notes.
Stage (optional)
Instead of calling them base, heart, and top notes, we index them, base being 1, and top is 5. When filtering items, and checking the ratio of them in a composition, it can be very useful, mostly for core materials. When browsing for items, the stage of the item will appear behind the name of it, followed by a slash (/) like 3/Linalool.
Categories (optional)
An item can have multiple categories like like musk, floral etc. When having a specific scent in mind, without having an exact idea about the materials to use, it can be very useful to browse by categories. When looking for items, if you search by categories, an item will appear under every category you assign it to, and every category below the name of the item.
Max IFRA % (optional)
Important note: the pre-filled IFRA recommendation percentages may not be accurate, and always make sure you check the official value directly from the IFRA website.
When creating a composition, you can compare the % of material used in it, and the % recommended by IFRA, when in Show total mode, and it will warn you if you're using too much.
Recommended composition % (optional)
Whether you experience it yourself, how much to use of an item in a composition, or take it from a site like TGSC, it can be a good guideline to follow to check if you used too much, or too little of an item. In Show total mode, Performula calculates both the amount, and % recommended compared to the actual usage.