Entering Bills BEFORE receiving inventory

I know that QuickBooks is able to handle these two situations:

1) Receiving Bills & Inventory simultaneously
2) Receiving Inventory before a bill

But it doesn't seem to handle Receiving a bill before the inventory, which is a situation we have often encountered. For example, for dresses, we usually have to pay 50% deposit up front, and then the remaining 50% before shipment. Therefore we have usually paid the full amount before receiving any bill. Unfortunately, if we want to create bills from purchase orders in QB, we have to wait until we receive the product before entering the transacations for the bill and bill payments that may have occurred months ago.

It would be great if QB allowed you to enter the bill first and record payments against it before we've received the actual items themselves.