Introduction to the Clearing Program in SAP FICO

You can clear open items from customer, vendor, and G/L accounts by running the clearing program. This program uses predefined criteria to group together open items per account. If the balance of the group of open items equals zero in local, foreign, and where applicable, the parallel currency, the items are marked as cleared.

When clearing open items, the program sets a clearing document number and a clearing date in the line items. It uses the document number and posting date from the most recent document (highest document number) that is part of the clearing process.

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
• Four criteria that you can freely define

You can specify criteria for each account type based on a single account or an interval of accounts. These criteria let you select what items to process together and ensure that only those items that are part of the same business transaction are cleared with each other.

You want to clear the open items in the Goods Receipt/Invoice Receipt Clearing account automatically. In addition to the criteria predefined by the system, you set the criteria for the purchase order number. This criteria ensures that only goods receipt items and invoice items that belong to each other are cleared by each other.