Nonprofits, sales orders, and receivables

We are a non-profit organization, and for the most part we don't sell things.  We use cash sales (for the most part) for donations, and we use sales orders to record pledges to give.  For example, people pledge to sponsor a specific child in a program in a community in Africa, and we create a sales order to track that pledge.  However, these are not receivables, and cannot appear on our books as receivables (a basic accounting requirement for us).  They are not enforceable obligations to pay as they would be in a normal commercial exchange.

When we originally set up Netsuite (we've been live since June) we set up Netsuite to avoid any GL impact from sales orders.  We create the sales orders to track the pledges, but we don't bill them or fulfil them.  Instead, when a donor gives money related to their pledge, we create a new cash sale that from Netsuite's perspective is completely independent of the sales order.  We have a custom column field on the cash sale that ties the item line to the pledge using a reference to the sales order transaction ID.  Then we wrote a script to