Your Walmart OTIF Score and Your Walmart OTIF Charges Count Different Shipments

The screenshot lands in a group chat. Someone pulled the OTIF Scorecard out of Retail Link and the number on it is not the number anyone expected.

Before anyone replies to it, one fact: the Performance tab and the Charges tab count different shipments.

A case Walmart attributes to itself is included in the first and deliberately excluded from the second. So a supplier putting the two figures side by side is not checking an error. They are comparing two populations and reading the gap as a double deduction.

SPS Commerce's Bekah Tatem documented the split in a scorecard walkthrough published 17 December 2024, and a separate SPS Commerce dispute guide from 28 August 2023 records the same rule.

The gap between the two tabs is not a billing error. It is the design.

The exclusion is not something you file for

The obvious move after reading that table is to find the Walmart-accountable cases on your own account and file something to get them removed. There is nothing to file.

Walmart sorts non-compliance into supplier-accountable and Walmart-accountable internally, and the 2023 SPS Commerce guide records Walmart acknowledging that its growth and size create room for error in its own processes and systems. The sort happens on Walmart's side of the system. There is no form and no case number to quote.

That leaves you worse off than a missing refund in one specific way: you are not losing the money on those cases and you are still scored on them. The Charges tab is the cash view. The Performance tab is the score view, and the score view is deliberately the stricter of the two.

Three things nobody publishes, and which we could not find in any source: what share of your cases land in the Walmart-accountable bucket, what categories Walmart sorts them into, and whether a case ever moves between buckets. A supplier who tells you they know your account's exclusion rate is guessing.

The second limit is the one that costs more

Third-party-caused events are not automatically excluded either. Widespread inclement weather. A distribution centre fire. The 2023 guide names both as the kind of event that does not remove the charge, and gives the reason in one line: automated systems manage and execute OTIF fines and do not account for these events.

A storm is not an excuse your week gets. That guide is also the whole public record on the point: vendor documentation of Walmart supplier behaviour rather than a Walmart publication, and no second source in the corpus repeats it.

Both limits are frustrating and both are true. A page that buried them to sell you something would be the copy this programme does not write.

Three 13-week ranges, and last year

The Charges tab's Trend Analysis chart compares three 13-week ranges against the same period a year earlier. Thirteen weeks is a quarter, so the chart is a quarter, two quarters and a year on one axis. It is not a week.

A single bad week is not the story that chart is capable of telling. One late truck taking your on-time percentage down four points moves the quarter it lands in by about a point, inside the noise of any month with a weather week in it.

There is a population problem in that chart worth noticing too. Trend Analysis sits on the Charges tab, so the line you are most likely to screenshot is drawn over the chargeable cases only, while the percentage your buyer quotes comes off Performance. The two can move in opposite directions in the same quarter, and neither is wrong.

Read case counts rather than percentages. OTIF compounds multiplicatively, 90% on-time against 95% in-full is an 85.5% composite, per Sharon Hayford's scorecard primer at SPS Commerce, 19 August 2026, and the test is binary per shipment: a 95%-complete delivery arriving on time still fails entirely. Consolidating several POs onto one shipment, a risk SPS Commerce flagged on 24 May 2024, can put one shortfall on more than one of them.

The DC map and the 104-week report

Distribution centre performance in Retail Link is drawn as a colour band: red from 0% to 60%, dark pink 60-70%, pink 70-80%, light pink 80-90%, and green from 90% to 100%. Same 17 December 2024 walkthrough.

Two things follow from that map. Green opens at 90%, which is exactly the on-time target for Prepaid suppliers, and it is below the 95% in-full target in force since February 2024, per SPS Commerce's supplier requirements guidance of 14 August 2025. A green DC is not the same statement as a compliant one. And nothing in the record says how a DC's band combines into your account score, or whether your volume across DCs changes the weighting. We could not find either. A supplier telling you the map is a weighted component of your score is going further than the evidence goes.

The Luminate vendor scorecard is unambiguous about its length: it spans the last 104 weeks, and covers warehouse weeks-on-hand, sales, initial margin percentage, OTIF and fill rate. Two years, per the same 19 August 2026 primer.

The measurement horizon is long, and that cuts both ways. One incident barely registers across 104 weeks, so no truck is worth an escalation on its own. A pattern does not hide, and by the time it is visible in a two-year view the window to fix the cause has usually closed. Luminate is a commercial document, not a compliance one. It tells you how the account is trading, not how much you are about to be invoiced.

What to do with a scorecard screenshot

Pull the two tabs separately and reconcile them once a quarter. A difference between them on a week with obvious DC-side misses is the system working. No difference at all on such a week usually means a filter is set wrong.

Then separate the score question from the cash question and give them different owners. Score: cause, DC by DC, case by case, out of the Performance tab. Cash: what was invoiced, in HighRadius, inside the window. Where an OTIF dispute actually goes, and the filing that comes back auto-denied if you use the wrong one, is in APDP and HighRadius are not the same queue.

A dispute wins the money and does not move the score. The 2023 SPS Commerce guide is explicit that your OTIF Scorecard reflects the issued fine even if the dispute overturns it. That is one vendor's statement of a Walmart rule, with no Walmart document behind it, and it is set out at length in an approved dispute reverses the charge and not the score. It is why the two questions belong in separate reports. The loop that finds, files and follows the money is in the dispute workflow.

Download the scorecard weekly. Trend Results, a supplier consultancy, instructs suppliers that OTIF data in the portal is available only for a limited window, and to re-pull prior weeks before a chargeback lands. That is a vendor blog and a single source: treat the retention period itself as unknown and the weekly download as cheap.

SQEP charges arrive from the same carton, on their own queue and their own clock, as a second stream rather than a restatement of this one.

Walmart's OTIF fines recur quarterly and are generally issued about five weeks after the quarter they cover, with the invoice copy posted to HighRadius within 72 hours of billing. Your dispute clock is roughly 30 days, counted from the invoice date, and it runs in the one queue where a win changes your cash and not your score. The two tabs are supposed to disagree. Count 30 days from the invoice date, not from the week the chart went red.