We customized the AP Invoice entry screen to allow us to associate an invoice to a purchase order. The downside is that it doesn't do anything functionally so the purchase order doesn't get automatically closed for invoicing. It's for reference purposes only.

Another option is to create a warehouse for the vendor so you can receive the goods but know that they are still at the vendor. Then you could put in a transfer order to move it from the "vendor" warehouse to your real warehouse. Not the best solution, but the only thing that I can think of.

That might work for me.  We have several 3rd party manufacturers that assemble our goods and each one has its own warehouse.  I could create a general warehouse and receive it there, then when it is received in our main warehouse a transfer could be done.  Thanks

If you use a Transfer Order, you can do a shipping transaction from the general warehouse on the system and a receiving transaction into the main warehouse on the system. That way your receiving department would use the same receiving screen as normal, just choose Transfer Order instead of Purchase Order to receive from. The downside though is that someone would have to do the shipping transaction before you could do the receipt.