Open item clearing is one of the conceptual things in SAP Finance. In layman’s terms, clearing is matching of items on two sides of the account, for example invoice and payment. However, there are also options to match (clear) items on a General Ledger (GL) account, for example for GR/IR account or bank clearing account.

There are three types of clearing in SAP.

1. Full clearing. This is where debit and credit items on the account are equal. All items become “cleared” after the document saving.
2. Partial payment. This is where one of the items is less than another. After the payment, the clearing document contains an open item with a “smaller” amount that has a reference to an opposite item it relates to. A “bigger” amount item remains open too.
3. Residual item. Similar to partial payment, this is clearing of two non-equal amounts. In this case, both “bigger” and “smaller” amount documents become cleared. The clearing document contains a new open item for the difference amount. This new line item contains a reference to the originating document.

Before we continue, I’d like to remind you that partial payment and residual items, although possible for GL account clearing, are not recommended there. That is because there are no references to other documents in the newly created line items. The text below mainly relates to clearing of customer and vendor accounts.

Even though SAP gives you a choice of clearing options, it is not always desirable to use both clearing methods on your project.

One of the reasons can be business process. It is easier for a business user to follow one set of logic rules when they analyse a chain of clearing for complex cases than to decide whether it was a Partial Payment or a Residual Item, and then apply a set of rules depending on that.

Another reason is that, in the case of a Deferred VAT, which is used in some countries, Residual Item clearing is a no-starter, because of the Deferred VAT transfer program.

It is a good idea to restrict users from making a wrong clearing, rather than having to fix the error afterwards.

There are at least two ways to do so. Both of them work through OpenFI functional modules, which you need to specify and program in your system.

1. OpenFI events 1025 and 1030

Both OpenFI Publish&Subscribe events 1025 and 1030 contain information about the clearing, if they are called up from the clearing transaction. The difference between the two is that event 1030 already contains the document number, fully ready to save it in the database. Event 1025, on the contrary, is called prior to document number assignment. That is why event 1025 is a preferred option here.

Clearing information is passed to the OpenFI events through the table T_AUSZ3. Field T_AUSZ3-CLRIN can contain an empty value, or be equal to 1 or 2, depending on the type of clearing in use.

• T_AUSZ3-CLRIN = ” ” (blank) for full clearing.
• T_AUSZ3-CLRIN = ” 1 ” for residual item clearing.
• T_AUSZ3-CLRIN = ” 2 ” for partial payment clearing.

If you want to restrict a user from choosing a wrong clearing method, you can check for the existence of “wrong” values in the field, and stop the document saving process. Throw an error about your rejection, so the user can fix it.

2. OpenFI event 940

The OpenFI Publish&Subscribe event 940 works specifically for open item clearing transactions. Its use minimizes the performance impact on other non-clearing transactions, just as in the case of events 1025 and 1030.

Table T_POSTAB in event 940 holds the information about the clearing items from the user screen. All items marked as active have T_POSTAB-XAKTP = “X”.

Partially cleared items have non-zero values in fields T_POSTAB-DIFHW and T_POSTAB-DIFFW.

Finally, items with residual items have T_POSTAB-XVORT = “X”.

So, there are three field combinations possible for items, marked for clearing:

If you want to restrict a user from choosing a wrong clearing method, you can check for the existence of a “wrong” combination of field values, and stop the document saving process. Throw an error about your rejection, so the user can fix it.

Now you are sure that there is only one way to run partial clearing in your systems.

Do you need help in understanding of clearing processes or other activities in your system? SAP Expert is ready to help!