Vendor Performance Review Template
Three documents and three sheets that score each month against your contract's own SLA tiers, then track the credits you never claimed.
Free download · No account needed
Performance Memo
Solvanta Claims Platform, contract year one
| Period | 1 Apr 2025 to 31 Mar 2026 |
| Commitment | 99.9% monthly uptime, Exhibit B 3.1 |
| Result | 6 of 12 months breached |
| Credit state | Months | Amount |
|---|---|---|
| Claimed | 2 | $13,500 |
| Forfeited, deadline passed | 4 | $7,200 |
Forfeited is not pending
Four of six breaches earned a credit nobody claimed inside the contract's own 30-day window. That is 34.8% of the year's entitled credit, gone before the next review ever looked for it.
Most vendor scorecards for this query score five generic categories, delivery, quality, responsiveness, cost, risk, on a 1-to-5 scale and weight them into one number. None of them opens the actual contract. A SaaS agreement's SLA exhibit already states an exact uptime commitment and an exact credit schedule for missing it. AWS's own EC2 service level agreement, for instance, tiers its credit at 10%, 30% or 100% of the bill depending how far uptime fell short. A generic rubric throws all of that away for a rating someone just made up.
On the worked example already in the sheets, Solvanta Claims Platform's contract with Bellwood Underwriters sets a 99.9% monthly uptime commitment. Missing it is credited at 10%, 25% or 50% of that month's fee, depending how far the month fell short. Twelve months priced $20,700 in earned credits. Only $13,500 got claimed inside the contract's 30-day window, the way Neon's own database SLA requires a support ticket within 21 days before it will even assess a claim. The other $7,200, 34.8% of what the year earned, expired unclaimed.
The same twelve months crossed the contract's own chronic-failure threshold, three uptime breaches inside a trailing year, by month three, and nobody sent the corrective-action letter it entitles Bellwood to demand. This pack drafts that letter, and the two documents around it, from the same scorecard. Deciding whether to keep paying this vendor at all is a renewal decision. Scoring its security posture instead of its uptime is a separate risk assessment job.
What's in the pack
Review Agenda
The period's SLA numbers, credit totals and chronic-failure check, arranged in the order the meeting actually needs them.
Performance Memo
The write-up after the review: SLA performance against the contract's own tiers, and what was claimed, forfeited and decided.
Improvement Request
The formal ask sent once a chronic-failure threshold is crossed, naming the breach months and the corrective plan's due date.
SLA Scorecard
Every month scored against the contract's own uptime commitment and credit tiers, not a generic five-category rating.
Issue Log
Every Severity 1 ticket logged individually, so a breach a monthly average would hide still gets its own row.
Credit and Remedy Tracker
What every breach priced, whether it was claimed inside the contract's own window, and what expired unclaimed instead.
How to use it
- 1
Open in River, or take it blank
Open the pack in River and hand it the SLA exhibit, or download the Word documents and CSV sheets and score them yourself.
- 2
Send the SLA exhibit
The uptime commitment, the credit tiers, the response-time targets by severity, and the claim window, read straight from the contract's own exhibit.
- 3
Score each month
Uptime and ticket data get placed into the contract's own tiers, and every priced breach gets a claim deadline computed from the contract's own window.
- 4
Claim, then escalate
Claims get filed before their deadline instead of after, and a chronic-failure pattern gets an Improvement Request instead of staying an unwritten complaint.
Frequently asked questions
Is this template free?
Yes. The zip is Word documents and CSV sheets, with no account and no card needed. Edit with AI is the optional half: River reads your SLA exhibit, builds the scorecard from its exact tiers, and prices every breach as your real performance data comes in.
What format are the downloaded files?
Three Word documents and three CSV sheets, zipped together. Excel, Numbers and Google Sheets read the sheets with no reformatting, and Word, Pages or Google Docs open the memo and letters directly. Nothing needs converting first.
We already score vendors on a weighted scorecard. What does this add?
The contract itself. A weighted rubric has no field for the exact credit percentage your SLA assigns to a specific uptime shortfall. It also has no field for whether that credit was ever actually claimed before its deadline passed. This pack scores against the tiers your contract states and tracks both, which only matters once a build-versus-buy decision has already chosen this vendor.
What if our contract has no SLA exhibit, or it's thin?
Send what you have. If the contract states only an uptime number with no credit schedule, the scorecard is built from that alone. Any commitment the contract does not state gets marked as a real gap, not filled in with a guessed target.
How does the chronic-failure threshold work?
Most SLAs of this shape give the customer a right to demand a corrective action plan after a set number of breaches in a trailing period. This pack uses whatever number your contract states, or a plain stated default if it states none, and flags the month that number was actually crossed.
Does this replace deciding whether to renew the vendor?
No. This pack ends at the scorecard and the improvement request a repeat breach earns. Keeping this vendor at renewal is a vendor management decision, choosing a replacement is a separate RFP evaluation job, and ending the relationship instead is a separate offboarding one, with its own notice deadline and data-return proof to track.
Score the vendor against what they actually promised
Send the SLA exhibit and whatever uptime or ticket data you have. The first thing back is a scorecard keyed to your contract's own tiers.
Edit with AI