yes it is a basic feature. We need to have this in ZOHO inventroy.
we need a solution how to deal with prepayments.
We don't want to write an invocie if we don't know if the client will really pay. After the sales order is paid we want to start with the porcess.

This is a basic feature that has been offered in QuickBooks Enterprise for years and years! The bookkeeping/general ledger side of things is fairly straight forward. As it stands now with Zoho, you can't even update the invoice date after the payment has been made. I guess Zoho deems that a payment can not be made earlier than an invoice. This is just not reality. The payment should be booked as a liability until the goods are shipped and the invoice should be dated on the shipment date. I agree...at this point it's sloppy bookkeeping. If someone at Zoho would like to contact us about how QB Enterprise always booked these transactions, we are more than willing to help this along. It would be a huge step forward for what seems to be something quite simple.

Yes this will save the headache of reconciliation of bank payments. Many a times order placed by wife is paid by husband or by friend. It becomes difficult to reconcile without talking to customers.

Same here. We also manufacture custom products and work on 100% advanced payment. Wish to have option for customer to pay amount via link on sales order / proforma invoice like one available on Invoice. The final invoice is generated only after products are manufactured and ready to ship.
Payment link on sales order / proforma invoice is better and faster choice as its not convenient to offer portal access to one time customer. Retainer invoice method is also not suitable in this case.
Badly need this feature of payment link in sales order.

Also I will add to make "sales order" offline payments. We do not start producing an order until 50% is paid so we are not using sales order module because we cannot track it. We directly invoice (which is not right)