Accounts Receivable and Accounts Payable in SAP S/4HANA — Invoices, Open Items, Reconciliation and Cash Application

What you will learn

• Trace one customer invoice from the business partner through the reconciliation account to its ACDOCA line.
• Clear two open items with one incoming payment in Clear Incoming Payments and read the clearing document.
• Run the proposal and payment steps of an automatic payment run in the documented order.
• Build an aging query on open customer items and reconcile its total to the G/L account.
• Decide, for a customer segment, between standard clearing rules, SAP Cash Application and manual clearing.

Concept overview

Accounts receivable (AR) and accounts payable (AP) in SAP S/4HANA are the open-item ledgers for what customers owe you and what you owe suppliers. Three things define them in 2026: the counterparty is a business partner with a customer or supplier role, every open item is a line in the Universal Journal (table ACDOCA), and the posting lands on a reconciliation account in the general ledger, so subledger and ledger cannot drift apart. The SAP Learning journey Describing the Receivables Management Process in SAP S/4HANA walks the AR side end to end; this module adds the data and analytics reading of it.

The lifecycle is short and worth memorising because every report and every AI feature hangs on it: invoice (open item created) → payment received or sent (bank statement, payment run, manual posting) → clearing (a clearing document, status Cleared, residual item if the amounts differ) → follow-up (dunning for overdue customers, payment blocks for suppliers). On top sit credit management, which compares open items and orders with a limit, and SAP Cash Application, which proposes the clearing.

Prerequisites

• Module M413: S/4HANA data model (business partner, ACDOCA, BSEG).
• Basic knowledge of general ledger postings (debit, credit, document, posting date).
• Access to an SAP S/4HANA Cloud trial or a Fully-Activated Appliance with a test company code.

Outcomes

• Explain why a subledger posting and its reconciliation account cannot diverge in S/4HANA.
• Name the apps for invoice follow-up, clearing, payment proposal, payment run and dunning, with their on-premise transactions.
• Reproduce the lab result: balance 2,500.00 EUR and one open item after clearing two of three invoices.
• Identify which items are missing from ACDOCA-based reports and where to read them instead.
• State the data prerequisite SAP publishes for SAP Cash Application and the status words of the 2026 assistants.