If you ship items to your customers you undoubtedly use shipping boxes and materials (packing, tape, labels, etc). how you account for them can be a headache. I carry them in inventory as an “Other Asset” and set the cost account to shipping expense, the income account to sales and a sale price of zero.

The tape, packing material, labels, stuff like that I treat the same way I suggest accounting for bulk items (see the TAG Bulk Item Acct’ng). You can also use the same system for the boxes.

Short of putting the items on the invoice as packing materials or something (which looks kind of flaky IMO) there just is not any other way to do it that I can see.