Magento: Making an "unpaid" payment method which then gets paid gradually over several payments [closed]

Question

we would really appreciate some help with issue or if not, some advice on how we can contact the Magento team or any professional in customizing Magento to achieve it.

A client we are trying to develop a cart for has some really customized requirements for their cart regarding the payment of orders. Basically, what they need is as follows:

The cart needs to have a special payment method which is "Net 30 terms". This payment method would not actually capture or process any payment, but it would create the order as a credit to the customer, which would then be paid within 30 days.

So far up until this point we have been able to implement this reasonably well with the Purchase Order Management module found at http://www.emjainteractive.com/magento-extensions/magento-purchase-order-management-accounts-receivables-module.html

However, at this point the client has said that they also want to be able to go into the admin and make payments from the back end on these unpaid orders, and have the cart process those payments and track them for each order. The payments would also be able to be partial payments, so the customer can pay them down over a period of time instead of having to pay all at once.

The Purchase Order module does not let you do this; it needs you to handle the payments yourself outside of Magento and then lets you go in and mark them as Paid when you've received the payment. Meanwhile our client wants to handle all the partial payments for each order right on the cart itself.

So basically, the functionality would be like this: The cart admin goes into the cart and pulls up an order, the order says "$200 still unpaid on this order"; the admin can then click a "Apply payment" button, where he or she can then insert an amount, for example "$50" and enter the credit card details and have the payment be processed just as if the order was being placed (but without creating any new order). After this, when the same order is viewed again, it would say "$150 still unpaid on this order" and show the payment information of all payments made on this order so far.

Further, the client wants this functionality not only on the admin end, but they want the customers to be able to log into their account from the front end of the cart and see their own orders with unpaid balances, and apply any partial payments and do all the same things described above on any of the orders from their account page on the front end.

We have looked far and wide for any kind of plugin or module for Magento with this function but we have come up empty. I would appreciate any kind of ideas, modules, quotes, anything, either paid or not paid, that might help us achieve this functionality. We are willing to hire comsultants and/or developers for this but do not know where to go or who to approach. Thank you.

Answer 1

This answer might be a little late for the original poster but I'll make a suggestion anyway for others finding this post relevant to them today.

Jon's answer above causes issues from an accounting perspective. When you modify an order in Magento it will create a new order each time you modify it. Reconciling these orders is a pain and most accountants would suggest you not do this.

The only "flexible" payment option I can recommend is a subscription model type of solution. If you can get the customer to agree at the time of purchase to a payment schedule then this could be possible. There are a few subscription based modules out there for Magento or you can write your own and use PayPal to manage the scheduled payments. If a payment schedule solution sounds like it would work in your situation search for subscription modules and go down that road.

If you are looking for an end-user invoicing an account management tool I would suggest you look at using a different tool to do this. FreshBooks can work along side Magento but it does require manual intervention. I would also suggest you look at some CRM solutions to see if those tools could integrate with Magento.

Hopefully my ramblings can help someone out there :)