Automating the Clearing Process

Objective

After completing this lesson, you will be able to execute automatic clearing for the GR/IR account

Goods Receipt and Invoice Receipt Postings

Looking at the process documentation, Alex investigates the concepts of GR/IR clearing and the three step reconciliation in SAP S/4HANA Cloud. She notes the following key points:

The three-step reconciliation is the standard procedure for posting procurement transactions in accounting.

The image is a flowchart depicting the process of handling purchase orders, goods receipts, and invoice receipts in a business system. It shows the interaction between Material Management (MM) and Financial Accounting (FI) modules. The purchase order leads to a material document and goods receipt in MM, which then creates an FI document. The invoice receipt involves an invoice verification document in MM and another FI document. There are also references to Material Stock or Consumption, GR/IR accounts, and Vendor accounts.

Three-Step Reconciliation

The process involves the following steps:

  1. Purchase order

    This step is carried out exclusively in materials management. There is no data posted in FI but account assignments, prices, etc. are already defined here.

  2. Goods receipt

    When the goods are received and to update the inventory, a material document. At the same time, a financial document is created that posts the value of the goods to the material stock account or the consumption account (debit). This document is also used to post the value as an open item to the GR/IR account (credit).

  3. Invoice receipt

    The vendor invoice is posted in MM. At the same time, a document is created in FI. This FI document contains the invoice amount that is posted to the goods receipt and invoice receipt account (debit), and to the vendor account (credit).

The last two steps can be completed in reverse order, depending on when the goods and the invoice are received.

Maintenance of Goods Receipt and Invoice Receipt Clearing Accounts

The image is a flowchart depicting the process of handling purchase orders, goods receipts, and invoice receipts in an accounting system. It includes components such as purchase orders for suppliers, incoming goods, goods receipts with FI documents on GR/IR accounts, automatic clearing of cleared FI documents, incoming invoices, and invoice receipts with FI documents on GR/IR accounts. There is also a note indicating that FI documents that cannot be cleared automatically must be analyzed and processed manually.

All goods and invoice receipts are collected on GR/IR accounts. If amounts and prices match, they are automatically cleared by the system. However, not all items can be cleared automatically, for various reasons:

  • Invoice or goods receipt is missing.

  • Amounts do not match.

  • Purchase order item was created with an outdated price list.

  • Delivery costs were posted on the wrong GR/IR account.

The GR/IR account reconciliation process is an exception-handling process for all purchase order items with differences between goods receipts and invoice receipts.

It is recommended to maintain the GR/IR clearing account on a monthly basis. This means that purchase orders and accounts should be adjusted immediately after the actual transactions.

How to Post a Purchase Order, Goods Receipt, and Invoice Receipt

Alex wants to check automatic clearing for the GR/IR account. She performs the three way match, posting a purchase order, goods receipt, and supplier invoice. This way there are open items on the GR/IR account.

Automatic Clearing

Alex want to test the automatic clearing process for the periodic GR/IR account clearing. She looks into some general information for running the periodic process and looks into relevant customizing steps:

Automatic clearing clears open items from customer, supplier and G/L accounts (in particular, GR/IR clearing accounts) automatically.

The open items are grouped according to fixed system criteria:

  • Company code

  • Account type

  • Account number

  • Currency key

The program also groups items according to a maximum of five user criteria defined in customizing.

Clearing only takes place when the balance in the update currency is zero for the group of line items selected according to the above criteria. The date for clearing is the clearing date according to your selection specifications.

The program selects open items, groups them according to criteria and then clears them when the balance of one of the groups is zero.

  1. The system groups the open items based on the clearing criteria defined.
  2. The program looks for every single item in the group whether there is one item with the same amount or some items that balance to the amount of this single item.
  3. The program tries to build a subgroup of items that can be cleared.

Tolerances are considered during the clearing.

Configuration

In customizing, you can specify the criteria for grouping an account's open items for automatic clearing. The automatic clearing program then clears the open items that are grouped together (as long as their total balance is zero in local and foreign currency).

System screenshot depicting the standard settings for automatic clearing grouping criteria. For the account type S (general ledger accounts), the default fields are ZUONR - Assignment and VBUND - Business Partner

The following criteria are always selected by default:

  • Account type
  • Account number or number interval

You can also enter a further five criteria. You select these five additional criteria from the fields in table BSEG or BKPF.

You enter separate criteria for each account type. You can enter an account number interval to determine the accounts to which the criteria apply.

Note

In the standard system, for the account type S (general ledger accounts), the default fields are ZUONR - Assignment and VBUND - Trading Partner Number

How to Complete an Automatic Clearing Run

Alex performs automatic clearing for the GR/IR account.

Log in to track your progress & complete quizzes

Learning

SAP FacebookSAP YoutubeSAP LinkedIn