WestHillsWeb,

So, you are NOT crazy. I am certain that many thousands of businesses have the exact same issue as you. We are one of them. I too do not appreciate robotic answers from well-meaning people. This is a situation where someone that wants to put an "engineer" cap on can too easily just talk past you and it can be very frustrating.

Yes, some engineer/developer set it up to where the ONLY way you can automatically accept recurring payments from a customer is to create a recurring sales receipt. If ANYTHING prevents this payment from being received, it will still mark it as paid. In may case many times, even though I am so thorough and could swear that it was checked, I too have found more than one invoice that was not checked. I remember one particular customer was going to cancel service on account of the bill that they thought was already paid. I should have fired this customer, but decided that I just needed to snap out of the emotion of it and realize that it would be more profitable to just concede this one.

It appears that no one is interested in actually solving this issue. They instead will blindly deny that this is an issue at all and that you need to create invoices instead, etc.

It is an obvious issue/oversight/bug that there is not any sort of alert, marking or safeguard to prevent a sales receipt with no or a failed payment from being marked as paid. If you could collect automatic recurring payments using an invoice where you could set it and forget it with no required interaction with the customer, that would be ok too. As far as I can tell, that is not an option. 

Good luck! Please let me know if you get anywhere.

Chris