Sales Order and Sales Invoice

[jrockfl]

We use Peachtree, but I'm sure the same would be for Quickbooks or some other similar accounting application.

Right now we only sell through our e-commerce web site.
Do we need to create a Sales Order and a Sales Invoice?

What is the purpose of creating both?
We charge the customer's credit card right when the order is placed (not shipped)

Sometimes a customer places and order for a couple items and we might have sold out of one of the items. Their credit card will be charged the full amount, but we may need to partially ship.

Any ideas or suggestions?

[piatkow]

Forget computers for a second and go back to classic business.

The sales order was the record that you create to document the request that comes in. The invoice was the piece of paper that you sent back to the customer asking for the money. For a cash sale an invoice is redundant.

Off the shelf software needs to accomodate a range of possible scenarios and would simplify things by redundantly raising a null invoice for a cash sale.