Credit Memo without Increasing Inventory

Hi,

We sell around 100 different products and accept returns. When I issue a credit memo, sometimes the returned product is defective, and can't go back into inventory. Is there any way to keep track of which items are being returned without increasing inventory? I don't want to return all items as the same item, for example "Defective".

The only way I've thought of is to create a duplicate item especially for returns by adding an asterisk such as "Product 1*". However, this gets messy since we can forget to use the return version when issuing credit memos, or using the return version for invoices.