Guide · Procurement
The minimum ESG data set to request from an SME supplier
A practical baseline for round one — what to ask a small supplier for first, and what to leave out until it matters.
- Procurement teams often ask SMEs for too much, too early. Round one should establish a useful baseline, not a complete disclosure.
- The same core information should ideally be reusable across customers, not rebuilt for every questionnaire a supplier receives.
- Twelve fields below cover a genuinely useful first round. Everything past that belongs in a later conversation.
Why round one should be small
A first ESG request to a small supplier is usually where the relationship either starts working or stalls. Ask for a seventy-column questionnaire from a supplier that has never calculated its emissions, and the likely outcome is a rushed, low-quality response — or no response at all. Ask for a short, answerable baseline, and you get something you can actually use, from a supplier that is more likely to keep it updated.
The goal of round one is not a complete disclosure. It is establishing the handful of facts that let you assess exposure and track progress — while leaving room for the supplier to answer more fully once they have the capability to do so.
The minimum data set
| Data area | What to request |
|---|---|
| Company information | Legal name, sector, headcount, sites covered. |
| Reporting period | The 12-month window the figures below refer to. |
| Electricity consumption | kWh purchased, by site or in aggregate. |
| Fuel / Scope 1 activity | Fuel types and volumes used on-site or in owned vehicles. |
| Scope 1 emissions | If already calculated — do not require it if not. |
| Scope 2 emissions | If already calculated — location- or market-based, whichever they have. |
| Waste information | Broad categories and approximate volumes, not a full waste audit. |
| Workforce information | Headcount, and any diversity figures already tracked internally. |
| Health & safety indicator | One metric — e.g. recordable incidents — not a full H&S programme review. |
| Environmental / sustainability policies | Whether they exist and are in force — yes/no, not the document itself. |
| Relevant certifications | ISO 14001, B Corp, or sector-specific — whatever they actually hold. |
| Targets and supporting evidence | Any stated reduction targets, and what backs them up. |
What not to ask in round one
This is usually the more useful half of the list. Don't begin with a seventy-column questionnaire if the supplier has never calculated its emissions:
- Detailed Scope 3 categories broken out by category 1–15
- Complex taxonomy mapping (EU Taxonomy alignment, activity-level eligibility)
- Dozens of policy attestations covering every conceivable topic
- Unsupported precision — decimal-place accuracy on a figure they are estimating for the first time
- Information you do not actually intend to use in a decision
Each of these is legitimate at a later stage, once the supplier has the baseline in place and the relationship has matured. Asking for them in round one mainly produces noise — guessed figures, blank fields, or a supplier who stops responding.
Making round one reusable
The same baseline a supplier gives you is the baseline every other customer is separately asking for. When a supplier answers once into a structured record instead of a fresh spreadsheet per buyer, the work compounds instead of repeating — and your team spends less time chasing the same fields from the same vendors, quarter after quarter. See how procurement teams send this to a whole supplier base and track who has responded.
Requesting this from an EU-based small supplier? The same twelve fields map onto the VSME value-chain cap — the proportionate scope EFRAG guidance points to for SME suppliers under CSRD.
Want suppliers to maintain these answers — not re-type them for every customer?
See how procurement teams collect and track this from their supplier base.