Jake,

I notice you are creating "products" for a lot of things that may not need to be set up as products to achieve what you want.

I assume you are setting up products so you can pull their cost into a new estimate easily. You could do this easier by just setting up a "template" job with those items in it, and then (using the "Copy" tab) copying those items into the new estimate.

You can do this for any individual item, or item assemblies with any number of sub-items or levels of sub-items in it.

To store and copy costs into new estimates, you only need to use "products" if:

• The item (product) can have multiple sources (vendors), and you want to track separate costs for each source, or
• The item (product) might be stored in inventory, and you want to track it and source it as an inventory item, or
• You might want to be able to update the cost of the item in multiple jobs without having to go into each job and updating the cost of each instance of the item, or
• You might want to be able to import and update the cost of the item from a suppliers price list.

You should probably not use a product for items that are always going to have a different cost in each job, such as Permits. For things like that, you would just set up an item in your template database, then copy it into the new estimate and plug in the cost.

This may be the reason the program is always asking if you want to update the cost in your product database. If you change the cost of an item in your estimate that has a product associated with it, the program is going to ask if you want to update the cost of the product in the product database. This is why you should not use a product for items that will always have a different cost in each job.