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I'm going to agree with BBDave - don't worry, this doesn't happen often...
Start with the size cycle and nothing in mind as a final outcome (don't try to fit her onto something that doesn't work). Do the whole thing, as if you're initial plan was to go full custom. Get everything in the center of the adjustments so there's room to play with once she starts riding. When you're done you have numbers to go with.
Now my very own rant about women's bikes. It's perhaps the worst of the sweeping generalizations in the bike industry. It's not even a solution, it's a response to a complaint - "I'm on a man's bike, I have too much weight on my handlebars, the bike is too long". Anybody who's worked in a bike shop has heard this a zillion times. So the bike makers, knowing that some genius is going to show up at the bike shop with a tape measure and pick the bike with the shortest top tube, make bikes with very short top tubes. There's only so much you can chop off the front of a bike before you run into your own front wheels, so the move the seat forward with a steeper seat angle.
This is where my second argument comes in. If women have longer legs and shorter torsos, wouldn't that mean the seat should move the other way? I always go back to the office chair scenario, sit on a chair with good posture (neutral spine), and lean forward. If your feet are slightly in front of your knees your glutes will take up the effort and you'll be able to sit there all day like that. Move your feet back a few inches and the quads have to fire. Three minutes later and your legs are starting to shake and you're leaning against the desk to hold yourself up. Put your feet under the desk and try this and you'll probably hit your face on the desk. So, their model is longer legs, which probably means longer femurs, and they're moving their hips forward??? If you can't get the saddle to pedal relationship right there's no point in continuing...
My third argument is about those women specific components. Trek uses the Bontrager WSD bars on all of their WSD biks now, from the 44cm up to the 56. In many cases I love those bars, they let riders with a short torso or limited rangeofmotion use both the tops and the hoods. Calling them WSD bars is one of the dumbest things in the bike industry (right behind myself). I recently did a fitting on a trek that came with those bars, but the customer have an almost unlimited range of motion and long arms. If I gave her a position on the tops that would allow her to take the strain off her lower back the hoods would have been about 5cm too close. If the bike companies want to do women's specific bikes - er, I mean short top tube bikes better, they need to work with the shops on options and component credits. Anything short of that is saying that a well fitting bike for someone with a short torso is going to cost a lot more. Think about it, you buy a whole bike, then you change out the seatpost (need more setback - stupid steep seat angles), the bars, the stem, the saddle, the crank length...
At some point someone in the industry is going to say "we can't offer a range of bars and stems and saddles with every bike" because it would mean more SKU's and inventory and *gasp* fitters who know what they're doing!!! If you go back 10 years, they said the same thing about frames. When Seven stared doing not only custom geometry but also custom ride a lot of people thought they were idiots. Now it's expected of a high end frame builder.
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