Allows suspense posting of out-of-balance journal entries. If you have multiple companies or balancing entities within a ledger, General Ledger automatically creates a suspense account for each balancing entity. You can also define additional suspense accounts to balance journal entries from specific sources and categories using the Suspense Accounts window.
Note that if you update the suspense account for the ledger, the default suspense account is updated in the Suspense Accounts window. Likewise, if you update the default account in the Suspense Accounts window, the account will be updated for the ledger. If you do not enter a suspense account, you can only post journal entries that are balanced.
Some examples:
Ex 1:
Consider one wants to use the suspense account to collect payments when, for example, the destination account is unknown and when it is known to recycle it to the right account.
Ex 2:
Consider one needs to collect payments that must be allocated to multiple accounts. For example, a 1000$ check has been received from our distributor and this check is supposed to pay a 60$ bill on account 1, a 40$ bill on account 2, a 120$ bill on account 3 and so on. We may also want to use the suspense account to collect the payment as a repository of the global payment, and then recycle this global payment to the multiple destination accounts.
Ex 3:
When you create accounting entries for cross-currency payments, the resulting accounting entry consists of two currencies: the invoice currency and the payment currency. Payables ensures that the entry balances in your ledger currency. The entry, however, does not balance in the entered currency. General Ledger identifies cross-currency entries created in Payables. These entries have a category of 'Cross-Currency'. For each of these entries, General Ledger separates the entries by currency before balancing them. General Ledger ignores the out of balance errors. Then General Ledger creates a balancing journal entry that is charged to a clearing account. A clearing account is called a 'Suspense Account' in Oracle General Ledger.
Note: The entry to the clearing account will always be zero in your ledger currency because the journal entry already balances in your ledger currency. You do not need to enable suspense accounting for your ledger to create cross-currency payments in Payables. You only need to define a suspense account for journal entries created by cross-currency payments. When defining a Suspense Account for your ledger in the Suspense Accounts window in General Ledger, enter a source of Payables.
