Non Destructive Workflow - Basic

I'm a photoshop artist and new to Audition. I know there is a workflow for making non-destructive edits, but when I followed the procedures outlined in a tutorial, I was not permitted to export my project. I'm not at my regular workstation here, and going from vague memory. But what I typically have are birds/wildlife calls with a lot of environmental noise from my (H5 zoom) recorder. So I'm trying to isolate the wavelengths from the subjects, and filter out the various noise types. The supplied filters work well, but sometimes they affect the subject's frequency, so having non permanent layers, that be re-adjusted  (just like Photoshop) seems like the best workflow.

Perhaps someone can briefly describe a setup for adding filtration to clips in a layered, non-permanent workflow. I'm not sure why I could not export the completed clips, but that only seemed to occur when I used the non-destructive workflow. Please excuse the vague terms, we don't have the app at this studio,

Thanks for any help