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Chapter 6 ■ Clearing Open Items
Assume that on January 1, 20XX, a customer ordered 1,000 items, the accompanying invoice was
generated, and the invoice was entered into the system immediately.
The amount of 1,000 remains in the account as an open item. At this point the transaction is unfinished,
because payment has not been received.
On February 1, 20XX, payment of $1,000 is received. The incoming payment is matched with the open
item of 1,000 and cleared. The net effect of this transaction will be a nil balance. At this point, the transaction
is complete.
Account clearing can be carried out for an individual item or for collective items in the system. The SAP
ERP system documents clearing can be carried out manually or automatically using automatic payment
programs. Clearing open items manually means that the user performs the clearing process, whereas the
system performs automatic clearing. For the system to perform automatic clearing of open items, you have
to specify certain settings during customizing.
In this chapter, you will complete an exercise on how to set up automatic clearing. Later, in Chapter 19,
you will look at how to perform manual clearing of open items in detail. But before I walk through an
automatic clearing configuration, I’ll briefly describe the two options in manual clearing.
Manual Clearing Overview
There are two ways to clear open items in the system manually: posting with clearing and account clearing.
Posting with Clearing
Posting with clearing occurs when an open item on an account is matched against payment and cleared
to bring the account balance to nil. It is also possible to group open items, match them with payments,
and clear them simultaneously. The system will mark them as cleared items, assign a clearing document
number, and enter the date that the items are cleared in the system.
In SAP ERP, posting with clearing can be performed on an individual open item or on a group of open
items (that is, several open items in the system are cleared with a payment simultaneously). Posting with
clearing can also be performed on an account type and several currencies at the same time by assigning
payment to open items. When you’re using the posting with clearing option, the net effect should be that the
business transactions end up with a zero balance. Open items and payment included in the clearing must be
equal. For example, the balance on an account of £1000 must be equal to a payment receipt of £1000.
On the contrary, if the open items and payment are not equal, it is still possible to post the difference in
the system. The system will treat the posting as a payment on the account and not as a cleared item. Payment
on account is when the item remains in the system as an open item.
Account Clearing
G/L accounts and sub-ledgers managed in open items are cleared using an account clearing procedure.
With account clearing, you don’t need to post an item. All you need to do is select the items in the account
that balance out to zero. When you post them, the system flags the selected items as cleared and enters a
clearing document number and clearing date for the cleared items.
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