Kroger Supplier Deductions: Codes, Fees, and Disputes

A Kroger remittance arrives short, and the line explaining it reads “Code 4 - Shortage” or “MCB-CMP.” You have 180 days to dispute most of what appears there. If it is an MCB compliance fee, you reportedly have 60.

Miss either window and the deduction stops being disputable. It becomes a permanent write-off.

The structural trap is that Kroger bills you on two separate tracks that appear on the same document. Numeric AP codes cover shortages, cost differences, and promotional allowances. Compliance fees like ORAD and MCB post as AR deductions on a different claim path with a different clock.

A team that reconciles only the AP codes lets the compliance fees expire unclaimed.

Kroger publishes almost none of this itself, so every figure below is cross-referenced across at least two independent vendor sources and flagged where they disagree. The dispute portal also changed names in late 2025, which is why older guidance points at a system that no longer exists.

What does each Kroger deduction code mean?

Sources disagree on how long the list runs. SPS Commerce documents eight numeric codes, iNymbus counts up to thirteen once letter codes are included, and Confido groups the same universe differently again.

Your Supplier Connect claim-type dropdown is the list that governs your account.

What compliance fees does Kroger charge on top of the AP codes?

ORAD, short for Original Requested Arrival Date, is Kroger’s late-delivery penalty. Per iNymbus, Kroger measures it against a 98% on-time threshold with a 95% case fill rate on every shipment.

SPS Commerce excludes ORAD from its numeric code guidance because it posts as AR rather than AP. No public source documents the fine amount at retailer-source quality.

MCB-CMP is the merchandising compliance fee, and it carries the tightest deadline on the page. Per ClearChain’s dispute guide, MCB fees allow 60 days from the issue date and file through the Kroger Supplier Hub rather than Supplier Connect.

Treat any MCB line as the short clock until your portal detail says otherwise.

WarehouseQuote reports that Kroger bills compliance as fixed-dollar penalties rather than a percentage of COGS, citing a $500 chargeback for a labeling error on a 50-case pallet regardless of product value.

That dollar figure is single-sourced, but the structural point holds across sources. Compliance fees are flat, so a violation on a low-value pallet costs exactly what the same violation costs on a high-value one.

Where do you dispute a Kroger deduction now that Lavante is gone?

Kroger replaced Lavante with Supplier Connect in late 2025. Per iNymbus’s transition note, PRGX still operates the platform, historical case data was migrated across, and authentication moved to Partner Pass with Okta Verify.

Anything you read that tells you to file in Lavante is describing a portal that no longer exists.

The mechanics survived the rename. You get 180 days from the deduction date, per SPS Commerce and Confido, and PRGX reviews the claim rather than a Kroger buyer.

One detail deserves more weight than it usually gets. Once you submit, you cannot modify the claim, so a dispute filed with incomplete documentation is a dispute lost rather than a dispute amended.

How does Kroger compare to Walmart, Target, and Amazon?

Kroger’s window is a quarter of Walmart’s. If you run one deduction-review cadence across every retailer and it is calibrated to Walmart’s two years, Kroger claims are expiring inside it.

The dispute-deadlines table has all four retailers with their clocks side by side.

How do you stop Kroger deductions before the shipment leaves?

The pricing codes (2, 3, 8, LC, SD) all trace back to a disagreement between your item master, the PO, and the invoice. A three-way price match run inside the ERP before the EDI 810 transmits catches every one of them, which is the same control the Walmart code 10 price-difference entry describes.

The shortage codes (4, 6, SH) trace back to a gap between the quantity you invoiced and the quantity Kroger’s DC scanned. Build the ASN payload from the confirmed pick quantity rather than the order quantity, and validate it against physical carton count before transmission.

The EDI 856 pillar covers the six ways that ASN fails.

Code 5 posts when an EDI transaction fails or gets rejected downstream. A clean 997 acknowledgment does not protect you, because the 997 validates syntax only, and the 997 vs 824 comparison covers why the business rejection arrives weeks after the technical acceptance.

ORAD is the one that catches operationally sound suppliers. It measures against the Original Requested Arrival Date on the PO, not the actual delivery date, so a truck that arrives on the day it promised can still miss when the appointment window moved.

The buffer belongs in appointment scheduling, not in the transit plan.

Which Kroger deductions are worth disputing?

A single code 4 rarely repays the labor of assembling a claim. A recurring pattern of code 4s and ORAD fines does, and the pattern almost always resolves to one repeating root cause: an item master out of sync, an ASN built from the wrong quantity source, or an appointment measured against the wrong date.

Fix the cause once and the whole series stops.

Sizing that pattern in dollars is what decides whether it gets budget. The OTIF calculator does it across your full retailer mix rather than one line at a time.

If you also ship to Target, the vendor chargebacks guide covers a program that flags a violation before it deducts, which is a materially different clock to manage.

Nothing on this page comes from Kroger directly. Your Supplier Connect remittance detail carries the version that governs your account, and if it disagrees with anything here, tell us and we will correct the page.

Last reviewed: August 2026.