Deferred Revenue - Accounts Receivable

As a software vendor, we need to invoice our customers for software maintenance 60days in advance of the expiration of their software license; however, accounting rules do not allow us to record an accounts receivable or related deferred revenue until the earlier of the actual start date of the maintenance or receipt of cash from the customer. We need to set up the deferred revenue module by product in order to amortize it over the maintenance period, but we  can only do this through accounts receivable entry and not cash receipts entry. Has anyone encountered this issue and resolved it?