If a customer, lender or tender portal has sent you a supplier sustainability questionnaire, the first thing worth knowing is that it's rarely as open-ended as it looks. Almost every version of this questionnaire is really asking for the same handful of things: your energy use, your fuel use, and a short list of governance basics. The rest is formatting.
Read what's actually being asked
Before gathering anything, go through the questionnaire once and sort each question into one of three buckets: energy/emissions data, policy or governance questions ("do you have an environmental policy," "do you track waste"), and free-text or narrative questions. The emissions bucket is usually the one people get stuck on - and it's the one with a concrete, calculable answer.
Gather your utility bills and fuel records
You need two things for a first-pass Scope 1 and Scope 2 figure:
- Electricity
- twelve months of utility bills, or the annual kWh/MWh figure if your provider shows it directly.
- Fuel
- receipts or records for any company vehicles, generators, or other fuel-burning equipment - litres of diesel/petrol, or mileage if fuel records aren't available.
Rough, reasonable estimates are fine at this stage. A stated estimate is better than a guess dressed up as a precise number.
Map your answers to VSME's Basic Module
EFRAG's VSME standard was built for exactly this situation: a small or mid-sized business that isn't legally required to report, but is being asked to anyway. Because VSME names its disclosures instead of leaving them open-ended, each questionnaire question usually maps cleanly onto a specific, checkable VSME code - which means your answer can be traced back to a source instead of reading as a one-off narrative response. See the full Basic and Comprehensive module list here.
State omissions honestly instead of guessing
You won't have a clean answer for everything, especially in year one. Where that's true, say so directly: label the figure as estimated, or state that it's omitted and why. Reviewers and auditors trust a disclosed gap far more than a suspiciously precise number they can't trace back to a source - an unexplained gap reads as a red flag, a labeled one doesn't.
Submit before the deadline, and keep the underlying records
Keep the bills, fuel records, and the calculation itself alongside whatever you submit. Next year's version of this same questionnaire becomes a quick re-run of the same process instead of starting from zero again.
Get your figures before the deadline.
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