EcoVadis assessment: how a small supplier should prepare

First: which EcoVadis request did you receive?

“EcoVadis” can mean more than one thing, and the preparation differs.

• The EcoVadis Sustainability Rating — the full assessment. A questionnaire across four themes (Environment, Labor & Human Rights, Ethics and Sustainable Procurement), supporting documents reviewed by EcoVadis analysts, and a scorecard with an overall score from 0 to 100. EcoVadis states that a rating is valid for twelve months.
• EcoVadis Vitals — a more focused rating that buyers request. EcoVadis's Vitals methodology describes separate questionnaires for manufacturing, wholesale, and other or office-services companies; some questions need a policy or certificate as evidence while others are declarative; and the result is a risk level rather than a 0–100 score. If you already hold a recent Sustainability Rating, EcoVadis says your results may be converted instead.

Read the invitation your customer sent: it names the request, and any deadline is theirs. For current product details, EcoVadis's own methodology documents and help centre are the reference — this page does not try to restate them in full.

If you are still deciding whether EcoVadis is actually required, that is a different question, covered in the EcoVadis alternatives comparison.

Confirm what is being assessed

EcoVadis assesses a defined scope. Its methodology describes three: a group (a legal entity and its subsidiaries), an entity (a legal entity with no subsidiaries), or a site (a specific facility of a legal entity). Find out which one applies before you collect anything.

It matters because everything you submit has to relate to that scope. EcoVadis asks that supporting documents relate to the scope of the assessment, and its methodology sets coverage requirements for reported figures — reporting is expected to cover at least 80% of the assessed scope, and 95% for greenhouse gas emissions and energy consumption. So an electricity total for one site, when the whole entity is being assessed, does not match the scope. Group-level documents are a different case: EcoVadis lets a parent company share group policies, codes of conduct and handbooks with linked subsidiaries to attach to their own questionnaire. The test is whether a document actually applies to the entity or site being assessed, not whether it names it.

Understand why your questionnaire looks the way it does

The questionnaire is not identical for every company. EcoVadis tailors it to the company's activity, size and location, using the UN ISIC industry classification to decide which sustainability issues are relevant. It places each company in a size tier — the smallest, extra-small, is 1–25 employees — and adjusts the weighting of what it expects to the size of the company. For extra-small companies, EcoVadis says it accepts less formalised supporting documents, as long as they are still recent, relevant, complete and in scope.

So do not prepare against someone else's questionnaire, a screenshot, or an old PDF. Inside the platform, each question and option has its own help text, and EcoVadis publishes a Document Guide describing what it accepts.

Gather the evidence before you start

The single most useful thing to understand about EcoVadis is the difference between three statements:

• “We have a health and safety policy.”
• Ticking the box that says you have one.
• Being able to upload the dated policy, with your company's name on it, that your business actually works from.

For the Sustainability Rating, EcoVadis says it can only credit answers backed by proper evidence. You can submit the questionnaire without documents, but the answers they would have supported are not credited. That makes preparation largely an inventory exercise. EcoVadis's own examples include sustainability management procedures, sustainability reports, health and safety policies, codes of ethics or conduct, employee handbooks, certificates such as ISO 14001 and ISO 45001, and annual reports with a sustainability section. Not every supplier will have, or need, every one of these — the questionnaire you receive decides what is relevant.

While you collect them, check what EcoVadis asks of each document. Its methodology lists them as formalised (pre-existing and part of how the business is run), complete, credible (clearly your company's), dated, under 30 MB, and machine-readable. EcoVadis also applies validity periods: eight years for policies and actions, two years for KPI reporting. There is a limit of 55 documents per assessment, and EcoVadis does not accept combined documents assembled from unrelated material to get around it — one consolidated report linked to several answers is the pattern it describes favourably.

Those limits and validity rules are the Sustainability Rating's. Vitals has its own, shorter document guidance: attaching documents is optional there, though EcoVadis says it can significantly improve the result; it asks for specific policies and named certificates (for example ISO 14001 or EMAS, ISO 45001 or SA8000); and it treats policies older than eight years as expired. If your request is Vitals, work from that guidance rather than this paragraph.

EcoVadis also recommends involving colleagues across HR, compliance, environment, health and safety, and senior management. On a small team that may be three people; it is still worth an hour together before anyone starts answering.

Do not write documents for the questionnaire

It is tempting, and it is the most expensive mistake on this page. EcoVadis states that documents created solely to satisfy its questionnaire will not be accepted, nor objectives or reporting copied from another organisation without evidence they are implemented. Where it finds documents prepared specifically for the assessment, it rejects them and shows an analyst comment on the scorecard that the requesting companies can see.

If something does not exist, the better answer is that it does not exist yet. A gap stated plainly is a starting point; a document that reads as written last week for this form is a problem with your customer, not just with your score.

Make your documents machine-readable

For the Sustainability Rating, EcoVadis says documents must be machine-readable to be fully considered: it uses automated text extraction, and documents that cannot be read may not be fully translated or reviewed. In practice that means:

• Export from Word, Excel or your own systems rather than scanning.
• Avoid photos, screenshots and handwritten forms.
• Do not upload encrypted, password-protected or locked files.
• Check you can select and copy the text. If you cannot, the system probably cannot read it either.

Vitals is described differently. Its document guidance lists PDF, PNG, JPG and JPEG as the best formats, so an image file is not ruled out — but it asks for your company name in the body text, because a name in a picture or logo may not be recognised, and the Vitals methodology lists machine-readable files among its eligibility criteria. Where you have the choice, a text-based file is the safer one under either request.

Prepare the underlying data

Alongside documents, the questionnaire asks about your business itself. Most of it is information you already hold, scattered across invoices, payroll and somebody's memory. Gather it for the assessed scope and for one clearly stated reporting period:

• Company details: legal name, activity, locations, headcount.
• Energy use for twelve months — electricity, fuels, and any purchased heat, steam or cooling — and the Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions calculated from it, with each emission factor and its source written down. Include other direct sources that apply to you, such as refrigerant leaks or process emissions.
• Workforce figures, health and safety incidents, and training.
• Which policies exist, who is responsible for each subject, and whether staff are trained on it.
• Certifications you hold, with certificate dates.
• Any targets you have actually set — each with its target value, target year and baseline year. EcoVadis states that for questionnaires submitted on or after 14 October 2026, a quantitative target is only accepted if a baseline year is documented in the supporting evidence; without one, the declaration is rejected.

If you do not have an emissions figure yet, it is the most approachable gap on the list. The starting point is the fuel you burn (Scope 1) and the electricity you buy (Scope 2): twelve months of bills plus published emission factors. Then add whatever else applies — refrigerant leaks and process emissions are Scope 1; purchased heat, steam and cooling are Scope 2 — so the figure covers the whole assessed scope. Scope 3 is a much larger question — see what Scope 3 actually is before you attempt one.

Answering efficiently

• Read the question and its help text before choosing an option.
• Answer from an existing internal source, not from memory.
• Link each answer only to evidence that supports it — one consolidated document can support several answers.
• Keep the entity, sites and reporting period identical across every answer and every figure.
• Leave criteria that do not apply to you unselected; EcoVadis asks that criteria not activated for your company are not selected.
• Do not invent precision. An estimate labelled as an estimate is more useful than a number nobody can trace.
• Keep a copy of the underlying data you used.

What EcoDiligence can help you prepare

EcoDiligence is a self-service tool for building an ESG Passport: a structured, self-reported record of your company's sustainability data that you own. The guided wizard runs in six steps — company, energy and emissions, waste and water, workforce and governance, supply chain and goals, certifications. For EcoVadis preparation, the useful parts are:

• Scope 1 and Scope 2, calculated from the electricity, heating-fuel and vehicle-fuel figures you enter. It does not calculate refrigerant leaks or process emissions, and it counts district heating in Scope 1 for simplicity, where the GHG Protocol treats purchased heat as Scope 2 — adjust for both when you answer EcoVadis. It uses dedicated emission factors for 11 countries and a labelled regional average everywhere else — see the Methodology.
• Headcount on a stated basis: an exact figure, and whether it covers the entity or the group — the same question EcoVadis's scope raises.
• A policy, training and responsibility record across six subjects (environment and energy, labour and human rights, health and safety, business ethics and anti-corruption, data protection, responsible procurement), plus self-declared compliance statements.
• Certifications you hold, recorded as you declare them.
• A shareable Passport and a PDF, so the same underlying facts are on hand the next time anyone asks.

Be clear about what that record is. A Passport records that you say a policy exists; it is not the policy. EcoVadis credits the policy document itself, so your Passport is a map of what to go and find, not a substitute for it — and we make no claim about how EcoVadis would treat a Passport or its PDF if you uploaded one.

What EcoDiligence cannot do

• Complete or submit your EcoVadis questionnaire.
• Give, predict or improve an EcoVadis score, rating or medal.
• Review your documents on EcoVadis's behalf.
• Verify, audit or assure your data — everything in a Passport is self-reported and not independently audited, including certifications.
• Promise that EcoVadis or your customer will accept anything.

After you submit: keep the work

EcoVadis states that a rating is valid for twelve months, and it may not be the only request you receive. The underlying facts — energy, emissions, headcount, which policies you hold — answer a CDP supply-chain request, a buyer's own ESG questionnaire, or a direct carbon-footprint ask just as well. The EcoVadis answers themselves do not transfer anywhere automatically; the prepared data behind them does, if you keep it somewhere you can update. For the wider picture of named requests, see EcoVadis, CDP and carbon requests compared.

Frequently asked questions

This page is practical orientation for SMEs and is not legal advice. EcoVadis is a trademark of its respective owner; EcoDiligence is an independent product and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or a submission channel for EcoVadis, and does not issue EcoVadis scores. Descriptions of EcoVadis are drawn from EcoVadis's own methodology disclosures and help-centre guidance as published in October 2026; EcoVadis updates its methodology periodically, so always work from its current material and the request you received. Data prepared with EcoDiligence is self-reported and is not a third-party rating or assurance.