Adding and managing custom filters & options on products

[Sue_de_Nimm]

Hi All, first post so hope it makes sense. Im setting up a store and importing 4000 odd products. We do not hold stock but we do have options that dont go into variants. Like colours of legs (furniture) and lacquer colours.
We work with different brands and they all use different colour and finish formats so ive set up hidden attributes on my existing site just for the filters - and may do the same with metafields. I need to be able yo bulk edit these though. 
So i need to put together apps that can help me bulk edit and manage all options, filters, variants and fields - plus we need swatches online. I dont want to be going into different interfaces and would like the elements organised. 

Looking at the current shopify where ive only added a handful of metafields (is this what they are called?) they already clogging up the page and arent organised by type. 
Can anyone suggest an app/combination? We do not want to use spreadsheets for anything other than basic price updates - even then they are no use as our suppliers spreadsheets use product codes not our URLS.