Costing a component is not an all-or-nothing operation. You can do different things with a component at different costing stages, which might save you time depending on what you need to accomplish.
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When you first open a component, aPriori retrieves visualization information, displays the part in the component viewer and displays the Cost Guide. At this point no GCDs have been extracted and no costing information has been processed. This stage is useful for quickly opening a CAD file and visually inspecting its contents. Since no information has been processed, you cannot save the part at this stage.
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When you go to the GCD Tolerances tab, the GCDs are extracted. At this stage, even though you have not yet costed the component, you can save it along with its automatically generated thumbnail, which means that the component will be viewable in search results, although its cost information is shown as blank or “0”.
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When the final stage is costed, the component appears in search results, and cost fields are populated with values based on the most recent cost operation.