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, ISO 45001, 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.
Once the answers come back, the work is reviewing them: completeness, freshness, consistency, and what needs a follow-up question. See how to assess supplier sustainability.
Requesting this from an EU-based small supplier? The same twelve fields map onto the VSME value-chain cap — the legal ceiling EU law sets, from financial years beginning 1 January 2027 and once the buyer's EU Member State has transposed the underlying directive, for what a CSRD-reporting buyer may require from an SME supplier for its own CSRD reporting.
Working through the UN Global Compact's sustainable procurement framework? Its first GHG actions ask suppliers for the same kind of baseline. See supplier GHG emissions data: where to start.
Received a list like this as a supplier? See how to answer a supplier ESG questionnaire.
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.