AbleCommerce Shopping Cart Software

Just my second day with a real site, so I'm just getting going and clicking around - BUT....

I placed an order for the all in one printer and managed to authorize and capture an order made with a P.O. I don't have credit cards set up yet. There is no possible way this could have been successful.

Can this be as designed? Shouldn't there be a way to show the receipt of payment when a check is received, ie: from a wholesale customer with 30 day terms?
.

Purchse order method should not be assigned to any gateway. Secondly configure your SMTP settings properly and also check the Email templates. From the merchant side when processing an order placed via Purchase Order method you will mark order status to paid manually once you receive check. So once order is marked paid if you have configured some Email template to send the reciept against Order Paid trigger system will automatically send the Email to customer.

I do not have ANY gateways set up yet. This should definately come up as an error when i attempt to authorize and capture an order without a credit card number and without a gateway.

Assuming I've got 20 credit card orders and one PO order.... If i miss the PO one and run ALL through as credit card orders, it looks like the order is going to be marked 'paid' and will be shipped, or am I missing something?

No this is not an error. In this case AbleCommerce will do exactly what you are asking it to do. We can not read the minds before carrying out an operation that it is correct or not. For example if you mark the order status of an order to Order Paid mistakenly there is no way for AbleCommerce to find out that its OK or you are making a mistake.

So in case of PO you can take Authorize and Capture are like flags that payment is processed. For example some can authorize the PO order when he receives check and may change status to capture on some further processing to keep track of payments for order.

Thanks. Your first post didn't assume that use of the controls. It seems like an miss-use of credit card processing controls....