how to remove assignment for consumable item

[simonjudge]

Once I have consumed a consumable item and assigned to a user, assuming the item is returned or decommissioned, how do I remove the assignment? I see no obvious way to do this.

[Community Alums]

This is not something that can easily be done today. The concept of a "Consumable" is that it is used once and then not really tracked again. Some items, like printer toner, truly are consumable, but some things are not, such as keyboards, mice, and perhaps even monitors.

If you are concerned with tracking specific items, I would consider whether they should be full assets in your environment that are managed individually with their own asset tags. If it does not make sense to track this way, and you are only concerned with available stock, what you could do instead of removing the assignment is to create a new consumable asset for the item that was released with a zero dollar value in the stockroom where you put it to be reused in your environment.

[KB15]

I'm looking for a similar solution but I don't think we'll be taking the full asset route, at least not yet. Is the purpose of creating another asset for increasing the stock number? Wouldn't the consumable asset still be assigned to a user permanently?

Just so I'm understanding, in a hypothetical situation, a person is assigned a keyboard, which is set as a consumable. It's assigned to them and the inventory number drops 1 value. The keyboard is returned to inventory at some point. A new consumable asset can be added to the stock room to reflect the correct number however the asset is still technically assigned to the user who returned it.

I see some potential issues like if someone asks for another keyboard that was returned previously. Someone may think that they already have one. Otherwise it seems like a valid solution as long as you don't take consumables as something too valuable.

[Damhoej]

Maybe my solution (from another question) can help??

Re: What is the best way to reclaim consumables?