We use paint, which is sold by the litre and is consumed on use. Note that we don't actually sell the items. If I buy 17.5L of material and book it into inventory, and use it on three jobs over the course of a year, it is currently not handled at all well.
Due to the value (some is >$70.00/L) and it needing to be booked to the jobs it is used on for costing purposes, the most common items are booked to the inventory.
Not inventorying the consumables means we can't easily keep track of the costs, you would just end up with lump sums being booked to placeholder jobs (or none at all) and no idea of what is at hand and how much it is worth.
The consumables also have a shelf life so inventory would allow us to write off OoSL stock when disposed of.
It would be super amazeballs if I could book items from stock, to a job (where relevant) and CoS/Expense/Other account, with them automatically consumed with inventory reflecting this. We can do adjustments but this is incredibly messy if you want to track material use.
"Inventory - Consumables"