I think you just need to suck it up and enter everything.  If some items are identical and have the same unit price I have grouped them as one before (but then it's a pain to have to split them out later), i.e. 10 Treadmills, 5 Ellipticals.

I've always used Forms Entry, but you might try the other entry mode for this purpose.  I forget what it's called but there's a button to toggle between them (QuickEntry maybe?)

Unless you have to deal with personal property tax returns, I would NOT use FAM.  It's not going to save you any time in data entry and it will add the steps each year of having to update, export, import.  You have to do this even if you made no changes to the assets.  Once you start down the FAM path, forever will it dominate your destiny.

Rick