Prepayment of a sales order

Prepayment of a sales order

How does everyone handle this common (at least it is common for us!) situation?
  • We require all our orders to be fully prepaid before shipment since we manufacture made to order, custom products.
  • Since ZOHO does not allow a sales order to be prepaid, we are forced to create an invoice at the time an order is placed to allow the customer to pay it.
    • Our sales category is therefore skewed, since the sale was actually booked at the time an order was placed, rather then at the time it is shipped, which is proper.

  • The prepayment  against a sales order would be booked on the G/L as "Customer Deposits" or "Customer Prepayments".
  • When the product is finally shipped, that amount comes out of the "prepayment" G/L category and moves over to the "Sales" G/L category.
    • This is a long time, standard feature of Quick Books Enterprise.  The only feature of QBE that we miss!
  • We have asked many times if ZOHO can change things to allow a sales order to be paid and the only answer I get is that we should work with retainer invoices.
  • This is unacceptable, as we need to list the detail of the various line items that the customer has ordered.  A retainer invoice does not allow for us to list inventory items and makes for a poor presentation to our customers.
I would love to hear how others handle this missing feature of ZOHO...
Paul VA