Over and Over and Over Import

Hello everyone, I'm really new to filemaker pro, my comp, has version 5 at the moment. We have a table that has product ID, and On Hand inventory, and fcst by month etc. What I've come up with is a database that we can place purchase orders on, thus we import the fcst, on hand inventory, cume, vendor information when we enter the product ID. The xls table seems to slow down the import by up to 4 mins. And we do numerous purchase orders on a daily basis, what I beleive should take 10 minutes, can take 2 hrs. Is there a way, that when we import all records, that it can save the records so that when we want to work on another item, all we have to do is just find that record that was just imported for that item, I hope I'm making myself clear. Or a way to speed up the import from the xls by just import the matching row for the product id?