Cmack, if you think you might eventually want the whole D-tools suite (which I do recommend), you might try starting with the Lite version. It is available for about $1k and will let you do all the drawings you need plus you can enter all your pricing and accessory data. You won't be able to print reports, but it will make doing the reports by hand a lot easier. I bought the lite version several years ago at a trade show and I use a combination of D-tools, excel, word, and Quickbooks to run my operation. I am planning to add the rest of the suite this year and there is no doubt I would have save a lot of time if I had done it from the beginning, but like you said I couldn't handle the short term capital outlay. BTW I think they may offer a financing plan now and also they have a module to interface with Quickbooks.