Open items
Transactions on a sub-ledger or reconciliation account that have been posted but not yet matched to an offsetting entry, remaining 'open' until cleared.
Open items are the unfinished business of the general ledger. An invoice posted to accounts receivable is an open item until the customer payment arrives and is matched against it. A bank charge posted to a clearing account is an open item until it is reclassified to the correct expense account. A foreign-currency revaluation entry is an open item until the underlying receivable is settled.
The age profile of open items is one of the most important operational health signals in finance. AR aged over 90 days is a collection problem; bank-clearing items aged over 30 days are a process problem; nostro breaks aged over 5 days are a control problem. Each domain has its own escalation thresholds.
Reconciliation systems are essentially open-item managers: they pair incoming events with existing open items, close the matched pairs, and present the unmatched residue for human attention. The quality of a reconciliation tool is measurable directly in the size and age distribution of its open-item queue over time.