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In this video we're going to show how to use pre–made line items in the line item databases. The pre–made line items, this is for when you've already created your database definition, you've got all your fields and columns, everything's set up. Instead of doing manual data entry where you type in every field of every line item every time, you can create a bunch of pre–made line items such as filling in product codes, thumbnail images, your prices, unit prices, unit weights and so on.

That way, when it comes time to do data entry, instead of typing in everything every time your users can just select your pre–made items from a drop down list and have the common information always stay the same. Already preset and they're only filling in say the quantity and maybe making a price adjustment. So all that is done in the Preferences and this assumes we already have a database set up and ready to use.

So we've got a custom database we've created for product sales we'll just go select our custom database. You can do this with any line item database, any of the pre–made ones, custom–made ones, doesn't matter. I'll go into edit the definition and this tab over here Line Item Data is where we're going to go.

Just to look at what we've got to work with, here we've set up one category for a products database and we have a number of fields. A product code, a description, unit price, unit weight, the quantity, the line and weight calculation, amount calculation. So we'll go over to Line Item Data.

Now you'll see the pre–made and pre–load options here. The preload, that's not what we're talking about in this this video. The preload is for when you want to set up line items that are automatically loaded into the database when you create a project every time versus ones you just want to pick from a drop down list.

So we are showing you the pre–made line items here. We've selected our category from the database. We're going to click the Manage Premade Line Item Data button.

And just like we're hand entering the line items from scratch we are going to add some items. Say if you have all this loaded into a spreadsheet you can just import the data from a spreadsheet. So normally you might do that by exporting your line item database definition to a spreadsheet, fill it all in and then come back here and import it.

We're just going to do this by hand and we'll add a few line items for now. Okay, we've added four line items and these are our pre–made ones that we'll be able to select in our projects now from a drop down. This gets all saved in the database definition file.

Now we'll go back and add a project for this database I think. Now we'll select our custom database. There are options in here so if this is going to be your database you're using all the time it'll just be automatically attached to all your future projects, so that's something you can set up in the Preferences.

Now we'll go and manage our data. So we have no line items selected and we're going to go to add a new line. But now, instead of having to manually enter everything every time we've got our pre–made list.

So let's say we're going to add our green widget. It fills in all the defaults, all we have to do is enter the quantity ordered. We'll add another row, we're going to do the yellow widgets, 13 of those and so on.

That will help speed up your line item data entry by using pre–made line items. We'll preview this quote. All right, so now that we've got our Invoice, we've got our Product Cost Summary.

We kind of like what the previews look like. Then we can just go build the full document. So building the full document, that has nothing to do with whether we use pre–made line items or import from a spreadsheet or hand enter everything.

The pre–made line items are a time saver to help you do your data entry faster. Now, I've selected our chapters, I'll go and build our final documents. All right, now our document has been generated.

Let's open it and take a quick look. There's our Cost Summary with our pre–made line items we're using. And that's really all there is to using pre–made line items.

It's actually pretty simple and it's a nice time saving convenience.