>Do you think it is reasonable to create the "package" you mentioned as an alternative, and along with the package, create all the roll records when preparing this package, or am I asking for trouble? In other words, as with the pevious example, asn order of 100 rolls, would automaticaly append 100 items in my production file for that particular job, before the rolls get produced, waiting foe the qc updates?

I think you should "generate" (clone, duplicate, merge, etc) as much as you can ... and leave the operator to enter the "blanks".

Operators add, change, delete lines as needed to get a working document (in the system).

"Standard Jobs" should be kept around as "templates" from which other Jobs can be genenerated.

This applies to lots of situations: Purchase Order line items, Work Orders, Time Cards, Stock Requisitions, etc.

Setting the "status" of these "documents" to something like "planned" (vs complete or executed or quoted or preliminary or estimate or whatever) flags these for what they are and controls the types of access that can be applied to them.

Documents progress thru stages: eg. Estimate, Quote, Approved, In progress, Waiting on Material, Complete, Invoiced, Archived ... or Cancelled.