Best way to build my report in 2012

I am using essentials 2012 and I am working on a bit of a tricky report.

Firstly, the purpose of a report I am working on is for conducting a physical inventory with some extraneous item fields.

Essentially what I want to do is create a table that has links to: Item, variants, barcode, and item unit of measure tables.
There is no absolute common field among all these tables to link from.

Using the item table as the 'key' does not seem to work since each item can have many different uoms, variants and barcodes and so only one example per item is being pulled. The part that is finding me stuck is that there are no fields that every single item has entries for. Some have barcodes, some don't so those results would be excluded and same for any of the other variables.

I have a report that uses many in-line "rows" functions and it is ugly and extremely slow ~20 minutes for no more than a couple thousand records. Is there a more elegant/efficient solution to pull some replication into a table format.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you,