Proposed changes to make it easier to ship after billing

[Chris Travers <..hidden..>]

Hi all;

I am trying to figure out the best way to support easy shipping after billing.  The big problem right now is that unless and until we completely re-engineer both the invoice and order logic, getting a perfect solution in place is going to be a prohibitively large amount of work.  The basic point is that ideally unshipped orders should enter the system as orders, and only after they are shipped/delivered should they be invoiced.

The ideal work flow accounting-wise would be:

Web store Invoice -> LSMB order -> shipping -> invoice

Web store payment -> LSMB payment attached to order -> merge with invoice -> close invoice.

This can all be done correctly right now but it has a bunch of problems.  The first is that an overpayment is not tracked per order, making automatic attachment to an invoice problematic.  This makes doing everything in this workflow perfectly at the moment is going to be very labor intensive.

What I am going to propose at the moment is something else, primarily because we are in the process of rewriting all related code anyway.  I would suggest that we provide an option to create a "shipping order" when an invoice is created.  The pro is that this workflow can be made to work and quickly.  The con is that it leads to the possibility of accounting adjustments at year-end in the case of backorders.  

What do people think?

Best Wishes,

Chris Travers