Activating or Resetting Open Item G/L Accounts

Managing open items is a standard feature for customer and vendor accounts. A vendor or customer invoice is always handled as an open item by the system. It remains open until a payment or credit note is matched against it, changing its status to a cleared item.

For general ledger accounts, activating the management of open items is an important option. When a journal entry line is posted to a general ledger (G/L) account managed on an open item basis, it is initially marked as open. These open postings on the accounts refer to unfinished transactions. When the transactions are cleared, these items are marked as cleared. The balance of the G/L account is then equivalent to the balance of these open items.

There are three variations of open item management that the system can handle:

• Open item management: Clearing accounts for Banks, Cash discounts, Payroll or Goods receipt/ Invoice receipts.

• Open item management by ledger group: This is relevant when performing parallel accounting using the ledger approach.

• Extended open item management: This is intended for goods receipt/invoice receipt clearing accounts.

For a given G/L account, remember that you can only implement one type of open item management at a time.

Finally, be aware that certain G/L accounts cannot be managed on an open item basis. This includes, for example:

• Bank accounts

• Tax accounts (except for deferred tax)

• Raw material accounts

• Reconciliation accounts, which are managed implicitly using the subledger open item function

• Material stock accounts

Open item management is typically activated during the initial setup of the general ledger account. This can be done using either the Manage Operating G/L Accounts app or the Manage G/L Account Master Data app.

Alternatively, you can use the Activate Open Item Management for G/L Accounts job template to schedule a job (schedule a program execution) in the Schedule Accounting Data Changes app.

Activating open item management by ledger group requires contacting SAP support.

Extended open item management for GR/IR accounts requires using a specific job in the Schedule Accounting Data Changes app.

The Schedule Accounting Data Changes app is a powerful tool that aids you during both setup and upgrade phases. It lets you schedule tasks to change some master data at the company code level. These tasks that can be scheduled are referred to as ‘jobs’ in SAP S/4HANA. This application doesn't only allow for changes, but it also helps in monitoring the impact of some changes in your P (Production) system and cleaning up the data from the Q(Quality) system, once the tests are completed.

You can use this app to run the job, "Activate open item management for G/L accounts". You can also deactivate this functionality if you ever need to.

Keep in mind, you can activate or deactivate open item management using this job in your production system, even if there are existing postings. However, the strategies to do so vary based on whether your production system contains account postings or not.

Also note that you can run a test first. This lets you see where errors occurred and correct them before you execute the actual update run to apply the changes.