Characteristics with different prices

Hi.
I have 10 products with a different price. The products are similar so they can all use the same 5 additional items.
I want the customer to use the option on the product page to add options and instantly see the new price. I think this is excellent.

This is how I can do this with Hikashop:
I use characteristics. Each characteristic has 2 values, [No "item"] and [Add "item"]. (I can see no option to add a price here). When I have saved this, I go to the product and add the characteristics to the product, choose ordering and save. Now I go to the "manage variants" and in my case I get 32 different product options. Each has a different price. So I have to calculate 32 different prices for each product, 320 prices in all and punch this into 320 pages (with some optional text.) This is very time consuming and prone to errors on my part.

If the characteristics each had a price field and did the calculation for me, I would have to punch in 15 prices. This way the system would make life so much easier, not to mention when prices change and you have to calculate everything over again.

If there was a plugin that would change this, I would gladly buy it.

But, perhaps I missed something and if so, I would be very happy if someone could point it out to me.

Looks like I missed something; Options.
I will check this out and see if it does what I need.

Yes - Options is it - so clever and simple. Thank you.
I suppose this is a classic case of RTFM!