Customer open balance analysis question

Question

Question: How do you easily track open balance of an invoice without using residuals?
Scenario:
Create invoice using transaction FB70
Apply a partial payment to the invoice or apply a credit memo to reduce the invoice balance. We do not want to use residual items as this closes the original item and reopens an item with a new reference number.
How can we easily and quickly tell the remaining open balance on the Invoice?
Example:
Invoice 1800000000 is created for $150
Credit Memo 1600000000 is created for $50 and applied to above invoice as a partial clearing.
When the Customer Line Items are displayed, the Original Invoice, 1800000000, still shows the full amount of $150 and a partial payment of document of <$50> also shows but with no link to the original invoice. Short of using the Text Fields, is there any way to display the remaining open balance of an invoice?
Calculating the open balance is easy when the customer only has a few open items; however, this is a nightmare when the customer has more than a screen full of open records.
Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
Greg Brown

Answer 1

When you post the partial payment, the system marks the document number of the original open item in the line item for the partial payment. The original open item and the partial payment remain open.
The system stores the document number, fiscal year and number of the invoice item in the partial payment. <b>You can find this information in the 'Payment for' field.</b> Thus you can refer to the original open item from the partial payment. When you post the remaining amount for the invoice, both the partial payment and the invoice are cleared.
This is per documentation for <a href="http://help.sap.com/erp2005_ehp_02/helpdata/en/01/a9bb94455711d182b40000e829fbfe/content.htm">partial payments</a> , you may want to test it out. Hope a similar feature is available for credit memos.