Deductions are the only line in your Walmart business where money leaves without anyone approving it.
Nobody approves it because you already did. The Standard Terms and Conditions attached to your vendor agreement give Walmart the right to deduct against what it owes you and to audit backward against documentation you may no longer keep. They also preserve its remedies on a shipment that arrives late, even after the delivery has been accepted. Most suppliers sign all of that before the first purchase order and never read past pricing and payment terms.
That is where we start. Once you can see what the agreement authorizes, SQEP, OTIF, and post-audit stop looking like three separate compliance programs and start looking like three ways of enforcing the same language.
An entire industry exists to chase these charges after they land. It does real work, and money genuinely owed to you does come back. It also arrives last and costs a share of what it returns, and it depends on documentation that may no longer exist. We will spend time on what recovery is worth and where it stops being worth it, and then spend the rest of the session on the money that never had to leave.
Most teams meet that money at the end, when the charge is already on the remittance and the argument has turned into paperwork. By then the decision that caused it is months old. It was made upstream by someone working a forecast, or accepting an order, or committing a warehouse to something it could not do. Sometimes it was made two years earlier by whoever signed the agreement that nobody has opened since.
What We’ll Cover
- What you signed. The sections of the vendor agreement that authorize deductions, set-off, and audit rights, why they apply whether or not anyone read them, and where you still have room to work.
- Your total Walmart investment. Where deductions sit inside it, and why reading the line on its own understates what it costs you.
- OTIF and SQEP traced back to the decisions that generate them, and who in your organization is making those calls today without knowing what they carry.
- Post-audit exposure. Co-op, allowances, returns, event funding, and the claims that surface a year or two later against documentation nobody kept.
- The economics of a deduction. What the charge understates, the documentation and time it takes to work one, and the math that governs what is resolvable. Why the root cause is the clearest argument for catching it upstream, and which earlier decisions would have changed the outcome.
- Prevention when nobody is getting new headcount. What to check, on what cadence, and who does it, along with what you can stop doing to make room. Including where AI helps with this today and where it is being oversold.
- Build or hire. Whether to build this capability internally or bring someone in, taught as criteria rather than as a recommendation.
Bring Your Questions
Questions go in as Jason presents, and the best ones tend to come from people who walked in with them. Pull the charges you have argued this year, or the one you never understood, and keep them in front of you. Attach your name or leave it off, whichever you prefer, and you can describe a situation or name a number without identifying your company.
Attendees also have direct access to Jason after the session, which is worth knowing when the real question occurs to you on Thursday.
Who This Is For
The fundamentals of selling Walmart are covered well elsewhere. This session assumes you are past them and picks up where that training stops.
Small and mid-size 1P suppliers selling Walmart direct. Marketplace sellers will find limited application here.
- You have never read the Standard Terms and Conditions attached to your vendor agreement, or you read them once, years ago, before you knew what they would cost
- You know roughly what the fines, chargebacks, and post-audit claims have cost you
- You suspect more of it was preventable than anyone has been able to show you
- You would rather understand the pattern than argue the next invoice
This is a working conversation rather than a workshop. You will leave with a clearer picture of where your money goes, though not with a finished file.
Your Instructor
Jason Pluenneke, Founder & CEO, MarginTek
Jason spent twenty-one years working Walmart and Sam’s Club post-audit from Bentonville on the retailer’s side of the table. He relocated to Northwest Arkansas in 2002 to launch Cotiviti’s first Sam’s Club engagement, which later expanded to include Walmart. Jason ran audit teams and later, as Director of Engineering, led the group that managed retailer data and developed their audit tools. He then spent three years on the supplier side as Vice President of Audit Services at STAT Recovery Services. He founded MarginTek in 2026.
He has spent his career on both sides of this problem. He is here to show you how to stop it before it starts.
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