Proper Way to Record Sales to Lessors for your Customer

We had a customization put together for this, but it’s more an automation (you can do all the steps manually as well).  For us, it’s very important that the actual sell to customer is the customer taking receipt of the equipment (ie, ABC Services).  Our products are registered with the vendor for warranty and we need to be able to register it properly.  We also rely on this for sales reporting; if a customer leases a piece of equipment for 4 years, we should be checking with them at the 3 year point to determine what they’re next steps are.

Parent/Child would work, but since the parent/child relationship is at the customer, you’re locking the customer to one finance company and you’re introducing a risk with payment entry (accidentally putting a payment from XYZ Finance against the wrong customer).

We approached it as a transfer of AR responsibility.  In short, we invoice ABC Services, and then our automation creates a credit memo (which hits a clearing account) paying ABC Services bill, and then creates a debit memo for XYZ finance.  Some custom DAC fields tie all of this together, so when we send the debit memo to XYZ Finance we also include the sales invoice so they have the equipment details.

An alternate approach (which would definitely be a customization, but a good one) is to have the Parent/Child relationship flow from Customer to Invoice.  I believe you can do that on AP Bills--the vendor may have a “Pay To” vendor tied to it, but I think you can change it on each invoice.