Processing Manual Clearing for the General Ledger

Alex is excited to get more hands-on experience with clearing in the system. She investigates posting journal entries to open item-managed accounts to see how the actual item clearing works. She first does some homework on simple ways to clear open items.

There are two ways to perform manual account clearing:

• Account clearing:

  When the related debit and credit postings are present in the account you use the app Clear G/L Accounts to select the open items and then post a clearing document. The system then marks the items selected as cleared. It enters a clearing document number and the clearing date in the document items. The clearing date can be the current date or a date that you enter manually. The clearing document number is that of the most recent document involved in the clearing transaction.

• Posting with clearing:

  During document entry, you enter the document amount and select existing open items that require clearing. If the total amount of the selected open items equals the amount of the clearing document, SAP S/4HANA clears the open items by creating one or more clearing items. If the total amount of selected open items does not equal the amount of the clearing document, the system allows you to post the difference

Alex wants to ensure she can effectively train users using manual clearing, for this, she notes the following:

• The manual clearing app can be used to clear one G/L account at a time very efficiently.

• You need to be sure to select the type of account first to be able to see it in the output for selection.

• You can filter open items using search criteria for any field.

• You can use the post-to-account function to clear remaining open item balances.

• You can upload attachments like receipts and text notes directly in the app.

• The system generates a clearing document with document type SU where you will find the notes/attachments,

Alex tried to reverse the document she just posted but she got a message that there are cleared items and the system didn't allow her to process the reversal. Checking the documentation, Alex sees that there is a process to reset cleared items before the system will allow you to reverse the document.

You can reset clearing transactions for individual documents. When clearing is reset, the clearing data is removed from the line items (and the reversal data, where it existed, is removed from the document header). The document changes are logged and can be displayed in the change documents.

You can also decide whether the clearing document should be reversed at the same time. If you do not reverse it, it will also remain in the system as an open item to be cleared along with the other open items.

Alex wants to understand what kind of configuration might be relevant for document clearing, she reads about tolerance limits for G/L account groups. Using this function you can define tolerance limits for minor differences to trigger an automatic expense/earning posting to predefined G/L accounts during clearing.

These are the steps to configure tolerances:

1. You set a default tolerance value per company code. It will be applicable to all the company's general ledger accounts where a more specific tolerance group is not defined.
2. You can define additional tolerance groups with different threshold values.
3. You assign the specific tolerance groups as needed to the general ledger account master records.

Differences within the tolerance limits are posted automatically. The system posts these to a separate expense or revenue account defined in customizing.

Alex briefly explores these customizing settings.