Specification that items in an account have to be cleared by other items in the account.

The total of the items involved in the clearing transaction must be zero. The account balance is therefore always the total of the open items.

Customer and vendor accounts are always managed in this way. This allows you to monitor your outstanding receivables and payables at any time. You have to define open item management for G/L accounts in the master record.

The program groups together those items from an account that have the same:

• Business area

• Trading partner ID

• Reconciliation account number

• Currency in which the general ledger is updated

In addition to the criteria predefined by the system, you can define up to four other criteria to group open items for clearing. To do this, enter the following when configuring the clearing program:

• Account type
• Account number or number interval
• Two additional criteria

You can enter fields from tables BSEG or BKPF as criteria. If possible, you should select fields that are also contained in tables BSIS (G/L accounts), BSID (customer accounts), or BSIK (vendor accounts).

Open item management ensures that all items that have not yet been cleared are available in the system. You can only archive a document after all the open items have been cleared.

You can see whether an item has been cleared in the line item display or document display. In the line item display, the last three digits of the clearing document number are displayed if you choose the standard line layout variant.