Clearing Open Items in SAP

If you are an SAP user, you may be familiar with the concept of open and cleared items. This is SAP’s mechanism for distinguishing between reconciled and unreconciled items within an account.

Put simply, an item that has been cleared has been matched and reconciled against another entry. Examples include a supplier invoice matched against its payment or a customer billing document matched against the payment received.

Subledger accounts, including customer and vendor accounts, are obvious examples of accounts that require this form of reconciliation and are therefore managed on an open-item basis. However, open-item management can also apply to balance sheet accounts such as bank accounts, accruals and provisions.

What Types of Accounts Are Managed on an Open-Item Basis?

The following provides a basic overview of how open-item management can be used within an organisation’s chart of accounts:

• Subledger accounts: Customer and vendor accounts are automatically managed on an open-item basis. However, the reconciliation accounts into which they are consolidated cannot generally be set as open-item managed.
• Balance sheet accounts: Open-item management for balance sheet accounts is discretionary. It is applied through a setting on the GL master record in SAP for a specific company code. Many balance sheet accounts are managed in this way unless there is a particular reason not to do so, such as when the account is a reconciliation account.
• Income statement accounts: These are not normally managed on an open-item basis because of the nature of profit and loss accounts. Income statement accounts do not need to be cleared during the financial year. Their balances are transferred to retained earnings as part of the year-end carry-forward process in SAP.

What Does Open-Item Management Mean for a GL Account?

Once a GL account has been set as open-item managed, entries posted to the account are recorded as open items. They remain open until they are cleared against the relevant corresponding entries within SAP.

Clearing should be performed regularly to keep accounts accurate and manageable. Organisations processing large volumes of transactional data can spend a significant amount of time managing this process. Open items must be cleared consistently so that accounts are in a suitable condition for reconciliation at month-end.

How Can I Clear Open Items in SAP?

SAP provides two principal methods for clearing open items: automated clearing and manual clearing.

Standard automated clearing can be effective when the required criteria are satisfied. However, the process relies on specific conditions being met before items can be cleared.

These criteria can include:

• The open items must be held within the same account. Standard automated clearing cannot normally clear items held across different GL accounts or subledgers.
• The open items must be held within the same company code.
• The reference selected for matching must appear in the same field on each entry being cleared.
• The references must match exactly. Any difference can cause the entries to be treated as separate items and prevent automated clearing.

If any of these criteria are not met during automated clearing, the entries remain open until someone clears them manually.

Manual clearing offers greater flexibility and can support more complex clearing scenarios. However, it is also labour-intensive. When an organisation has a large number of accounts or high volumes of open items, manual clearing in SAP can become difficult to manage.

Users can spend a considerable amount of time selecting accounts, reviewing limited reference information and attempting to identify matching entries for clearing.

How Can BEST Open Item Clearing Help?

If your organisation spends significant time clearing items manually within SAP, BEST Open Item Clearing can automate and simplify the process.

The module is designed to handle large data selections and high transaction volumes. It provides the flexibility associated with manual clearing while automating much of the work.

Open items selected through BEST can be cleared across different account types and company codes, where permitted by the relevant SAP configuration and business rules. References can also be transformed to support accurate matching. For example, leading zeros or special characters can be removed before the references are compared.

This removes the need to post unnecessary journal entries or perform mass changes to reference data simply to enable clearing.

BEST Open Item Clearing allows users to select matching criteria dynamically and apply multiple clearing rules to a set of open items. These rules can be applied without requiring a separate configuration change for every matching scenario.

Programmatic search functionality can also identify matching references across multiple document fields.

Repeatable clearing processes can be fully automated and scheduled to run without manual intervention. Because the module operates within SAP, it uses the organisation’s existing SAP authorisations, controls and system configuration.

Comprehensive reporting allows finance teams to monitor clearing activity, understand how open items are being cleared and identify opportunities for further improvements.

Accounts that are cleared efficiently are easier and quicker to reconcile at month-end, helping to shorten the financial close. Once matched items have been removed from the account, the genuine reconciling items become more visible and can be investigated appropriately.

This allows finance teams to spend more time resolving meaningful exceptions instead of manually searching for items that can be cleared.

Find out more about automating open-item clearing in SAP with BEST.

Email the BEST team or contact BEST online to arrange a demonstration of the complete BEST Open Item Clearing functionality.