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

Zoho Desk Resources

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