Prepaying foreign suppliers

Hello

We currently have a very manual process for paying foreign suppliers for Inventory.  We issue 3-way match POs for all inventory.  We are required to pay for the items when the product leaves the supplier's port.  Once we receive the invoice, we manually code it to a Prepaid asset account (so we can go ahead and pay without having to wait for 3-way match).  Then, we manually query the PO periodically to see if the goods have been received on the PO.  When they have, we cancel the prepaid line and match the invoice to the PO.

Certainly there has to be a better way to do this.