Ask a vendor finance team how far back their deduction problem goes and the answer is usually a few months. That is not what the account holds. It is what Vendor Central will show them.
The interface and the entitlement are two different things. What you can see on screen is a narrow, recent slice. What is still recoverable stretches back years behind it, and the gap between those two numbers is where most of the money sits.
What the screen shows you
Three limits stack on top of each other, and each one is easy to mistake for the whole picture:
- The Review/Dispute Shortages view in Vendor Central surfaces claims raised in roughly the last thirty days. Anything older drops off the working screen.
- Shortage claim history in the interface generally reaches back about nine months. Past that, the claims exist but you are not looking at them.
- Co-op carries its own clock. Amazon applies a two-year limit on disputing a co-op invoice from its invoice date, which is separate from anything on the shortage side.
A team working from the screen will therefore chase a month of shortages, conclude the problem is small, and never see the four years sitting behind it.
Vendor Central is built for running the account, not for auditing it. Nothing in the interface is designed to show you the full recoverable balance, and nothing is going to prompt you that it exists.
What is actually still open
Amazon’s dispute eligibility on shortages has historically reached back up to five years from the invoice date, and a full audit pulls the whole window rather than the visible part of it. In practice the workable range has tightened in recent years, with much of the current volume falling inside a two-year band, and it varies by account and claim type.
Which is exactly why guessing is the wrong approach. The look-back is not a fixed number you can apply from the outside — it depends on invoice dates, claim types and what has already been disputed once. The audit establishes it per claim rather than assuming it.
Why old claims are harder, and still worth filing
An eighteen-month-old shortage is more work than a two-month-old one. The carrier’s proof of delivery has to be retrieved rather than pulled, the signed bill of lading may sit with a freight forwarder, and whoever managed that shipment has often moved on.
The economics still favour filing. The claim value does not decay with age, the evidence requirement is the same evidence requirement, and the alternative is letting it expire. Where a claim needs a document only you hold, we batch those requests rather than coming back to you claim by claim.
The practical consequence
Two things follow from this, and they pull in the same direction.
The first is that the oldest recoverable claims should be worked first, because they are the ones with a deadline. A claim raised last week will still be filable next quarter. One from three years ago may not be.
The second is that once the backlog is cleared, the audit should keep running. Deductions do not stop, and a claim caught in the period it lands is far cheaper to win than the same claim caught two years later — the evidence is still easy to pull and the window is wide open. That is the whole argument for continuous monitoring over a one-off cleanup project.
If you want the real number for your own account rather than the general case, the audit reads the full window and comes back in about ten days.