Creating an Item, can attributes such as unit cost and vendor copy to each variation

[Soha]

We have 3 stores 6 locations with at times 30 employees and almost 50k sku's in our system.   One problem we have is entering items as we recieve $750k to $1million in inventory every year, most right before summer.  We are trying to find ways to speed up putting inventory in the system.  Find that exporting and importing has caused more problems then it's worth in the past.  We are finally looking at using options instead of variations so much. 

As of right now we put each item in the system by putting Brand - name of item.  We do the same in variations for size and color.  we want to try to get away from this as it's not very effective as it's one more problem an employee can mess up.  So we are looking at options.  But our big problem comes to unit cost, price and vendor.  Is there a way to put unit cost, price, and vendor in first, so when i create option variations it will copy the attributes such as vendor to each variation?  

This becomes very time consuming as we could have 1200 items show up in one shipment a day.  

Any thoughts beside biting the bullet and going to lightspeed?

[Candlestore]

@Soha ;

I have an idea.... export your current inventory so you have a template... make 1 item call it Template fill in as MUCH information as you can for this one item or a description of the item in a csv file.  I know you hate importing exporting.  Delete everything except the Headers and your New Item Template Row.

Import this into Google Sheets and create a form, if your good with Excel or an employee is you can do that too.  Manipulate the form so that your data entry lines up where you want and appears as you want.  The data will then be saved back into a spreadsheet for export.  The only thing I have noticed is that Google places a Timestamp column and possibly a email address of whoever filled in the form.  Delete those columns before trying to export.  Also if it is a NEW item leave the Token field Blank, Square assigns a token to identify the item when a change is made.   I actually do this with Google Forms for my Scent Samples, and have the Form Questions laid out in a logical order but it appears differently on the spreadsheet so I can easily check costs etc and find the scent we prefer and know which ones not to ask for samples of in the future.