Thank you both very much!!! I actually wound up figuring out a way to get QB to natively copymasterdetail for my grandparent table by turning off recurse and only including one additional child table, and then setting up an action to create a child record in the other related table I need (the one causing looping relationship issues). So now I'm working on creating an automation to clear out a couple of status fields in that grandparent record when a record with "copy" in the title is added - what do you use as filter criteria for automations when you're asking it to edit itself?