Customer / Supplier Account Balances

I am having a lot of trouble reconciling customer and supplier account balances in Quickbooks with other systems that some of my clients use. As a for instance, one of my clients runs a nursery and issues invoices to parents every month. However, parents rarely pay the invoiced amount and will often pay whatever they can afford - in some instances, they will even over-pay at certain times of the year to build up credit they can use at other times of the year (so I have deferred income). The Quickbooks method of showing invoices and payments in a customer account is not very helpful in a situation like this because it is forcing my client to try and create matches between payments and invoices when really they don't exist - reconciling accounts then becomes an absolute nightmare because you cant actually see the payments received on the account screen (what you see is the matches created). Surely it would be easier if there was an option to essentially treat an account as a box in such a case into which invoices and payments are posted and a running total is maintained (perhaps is could be a particular account type or something) and the view on the screen would be like a bank statement (with debits, credits and balances showing all transcations in their entirety) - you can of course use customer statements to approximate something like that but it is a very unsatisfactory way of dealing with what ought to be a straightforward issue - I can't imagine I am the only one who has this hedache ??