In a business, you may be required to clear open items related to both customer and vendor with each others. This type of clearing will take place only when vendor and customer of a company are same.
For example; it may happen in a business that you are procuring certain raw materials for your finished products and after producing it you are selling certain portion to the same vendor from whom you have procured the raw material.
In this kind of situation, instead of paying for raw materials and getting payment for finished goods what a business can do is, they set off both transaction and make payment for the balance amount or received the payments as the case may be.
If you want to clear open items in this kind of situation then certain extra setting are required to be done for both customer and vendor master to send a message in sap that both master data are related to each other. To clear such open items related to both customer and vendor, you need to carry out following settings;
- You have to enter the vendor account number in customer master and then the customer account in vendor master. Once this is done both will be treated as one in sap.
- Select the field “clearing with vendor” in customer master and “clearing with customer” in vendor master. With this setting sap will decide whether sap will clear open item between customer and vendors or not.
With these settings in place, both customers and vendor master are now ready to clear open items with each other. Clearing both vendor and customer master depends on your business requirements. If your business requires this specific settings to set off both accounts before making payments then go ahead and customize it. If you have a decentralized accounting where you do not have a track of transactions more frequently or your vendor do not want these kind of set off then better not to connect both accounts.