Open Item Management

Purpose:

An open item represents an incomplete business transaction. For example, an invoice item that has not yet been paid is recorded as an open item in the contract account until it is paid and cleared. The facility to manage line items on an open item basis enables you to check which receivables and payables are outstanding. In Contract Accounts Receivable and Payable, your accounts must be managed on an open item basis in order to be able to use most procedures (such as dunning or payment).

Features

Open items are produced during each posting procedure in a contract account. You can:

·        Display open items using document display (see Postings and Documents) and account balance display (see Account Balance Display)

·        Change open items using the document change function (see Postings and Documents)

·        Clear open items to document that a business transaction has been completed, for example, an incoming payment for an invoice

You can clear open items belonging to a contract account either partially or in full. For partial clearing, the system stores the open residual amount for the item and the cleared amount. In the open item, you can enter a due date for net payment, due date for cash discount, and/or deferral date. If you enter a deferral date, the open item is not processed again by the dunning or payment program until this date has elapsed. Clearing restrictions or clearing indicators mean that line items can only be cleared by particular business transactions or settled, meaning they are neither paid out nor collected. Open items can be cleared in a currency other than the currency in which the open item was entered. If you clear the item in an alternative currency, the system performs the necessary translations between the two currencies. The translation involves two steps:

...

       1.      Translation of document currency to local currency

       2.      Translation of local currency to clearing currency

For the translation, the system uses the average rates in accordance with the exchange rate table. If you have agreed other exchange rates or amounts with the customer, differences arise during the translation. To avoid these differences, you can change the translated amounts in the Account Maintenance (SAP menu: Account ® Maintenance) on the screen Account Maintenance: Process Open Items (see Assigning Clearing Amounts and Cash Discount).
In addition to determining exchange rate differences during clearing in foreign currency, the system carries out other automatic postings dependent on the business transaction. For example, it automatically calculates small differences that are within predefined tolerance limits, cash discounts, and taxes, and posts them to the G/L accounts defined in Customizing. In automatic clearing (for example, posting payment lots), the payment amount is assigned to the open items according to industry-specific or customer-specific rules automatically via clearing control.

Functions with which you can clear open items

·        Account maintenance (see Automatic Account Maintenance and Manual Account Maintenance)
Allows you to clear or partially clear posted open items, such as invoices and payments on account, if the total amount of the selected line items is zero.

·        Payment program (see Creating Forms and Payment Media)
All items paid by the payment program are cleared.

·        Post a payment lot (see Processing Incoming and Outgoing Payments)
A posting document is created for each payment in a payment lot or a check lot. There is usually an item in the bank clearing account for each instance where open items bearing the same amount are cleared.

·        Posting with payment at cash desk

·        Reversing a document (see Postings and Documents)
The reversal document clears all open items in the original document.

·        Posting a return (see Returns)
Down payments and payments on account that were posted for an incoming payment or debit memo are cleared by the returns document.

·        Resetting clearing (see Resetting Clearing)
If down payment requests or budget billing requests are contained in a clearing that is to be reset, the down payments or budget billing payments that were created by the clearing are cleared again by the reset document.

·        Posting a document (see Postings and Documents)
Enables a combination of the entry of new posting items and clearing of posted open items.

Functions with which you can reset clearing

·        Resetting clearing
If open items were cleared accidentally with a payment, you can reset clearing.

·        Reversing a document
When you reverse a clearing document, all items that were cleared by the clearing document become open items again.

·        Posting a return
When you post a return for a payment document, all items that were cleared by the payment document become open items again.