Why the clearing document always has line items in NewGL

Dmitry Kaglik

November 18, 2012

SAP

3 Comments

Pen to paper Project 365(2) Day 145

New GL is an evolution of the SAP system. It brought new functionalities which were awaited by many users.

I don’t know about you, but NewGL was usually a very useful feature for my clients.

Along with new features come changes in the old functionality.

The clearing document in older versions of SAP could be just a record in the header table without any records in the line item table. It could happen if all the analytical fields in both cleared documents are identical.

This is no longer the case in NewGL. The clearing document always contains line items here, even if all the fields in the line items are identical.

Why?

This happens because of document splitting. This is a functionality that, for example, allows you to analyze customer debt by profit centre.

Let me give you an example.

Your customer invoice has 2 revenue lines with different Profit Centres: A and B. Say, A and B represent different divisions of your company. In old SAP versions you had to make additional workarounds to analyze customer debt per Profit Centre, i.e. how much of an outstanding debt belongs to each division. New GL brings in document splitting, which automatically splits into its own tables the liability between Profit Centres. It makes it easy now to get liability per Profit Centre, because the data is already there. As a side effect, splitting drops off the customer number, because it only processes GL account information. But that is better than nothing, isn’t it?

Now you have the customer payment which you posted directly to the customer account without any clearing. Whatever the reason is…

Third step, you clear the customer items, invoice and payment, against each other.

From the top level, all the information in both invoice and payment line items is identical. There is no reason to create additional line items.

Yes, you are right, if you’re in an older SAP version.

But now let’s take the splitting information into consideration. It currently has something from the customer invoice. If we do not split payment information, these invoice line items will stay on the balance forever. You’ll get inconsistency between the Sales ledger and the Splitting information. What is the solution? We need to split line items on the payments too! How? It is no longer possible to split the line items in payment, because the document was posted beforehand. Thus, we need to split line items in the clearing document. If you want to split something, you need to have it. It means that the clearing document should have line items.

This is the reason. What is the result? Every clearing document in NewGL contains line items, even if all the fields in the cleared documents are identical at first glance. Because they are not identical in the deeper analysis.

What other side-effects of NewGL implementation have you noticed?

Image: Keith Williamson, licensed under Creative Commons

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3 Comments

  • Mahmoud Habeeb on February 25, 2013

    Dear Sir,
    Kindly I need more explanation about document splitting.
    Thanks in advance.

  • Muhammad on March 20, 2014

    Sir, this is awesome ,keep it up

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