Sustainability data in your accounts – why they're more connected than you think

What is sustainability data, really?

Sustainability data is information about a company's impact on the environment, social conditions, and governance — often referred to as ESG (Environment, Social and Governance). The most concrete and measurable part for most SMEs is climate data: how significant are greenhouse gas emissions, how much energy is consumed, and where does it come from?

But sustainability data also covers how you treat your employees, whether you have a code of conduct, what your board composition looks like, and whether you actively work against bribery and corruption. Ensuring this information is accurate and readily accessible is an important goal for any company that wants to build trust with its stakeholders.

It might sound like questions for listed companies. But it's no longer just their reality — it's something more and more small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) need to be able to account for.

Why is it being asked for now?

EU sustainability legislation CSRD requires the very largest companies to produce a sustainability report. Wave 1 companies — large public interest entities (PIEs) such as listed companies, banks and insurance companies with more than 500 employees — must report for financial years beginning 1 July 2024 or later, with the first reports published in 2025 or 2026. The first sustainability reports were submitted during 2025, and for companies with non-calendar financial years, submission is ongoing into 2026¹. Other large companies (Wave 2) follow with sustainability reporting from financial year 2027, after the EU's Stop-the-Clock decision postponed their requirements by two years².

And when these companies need to produce their sustainability report covering the entire value chain, they need data from their suppliers — which often means from you.

This means banks, large corporations and public procurement bodies are increasingly asking their suppliers and business partners about sustainability. Simply because they need that information in order to report onwards.

The European Commission adopted a recommendation in July 2025 that companies wishing to report voluntarily should use the VSME standard. The standard is intended to serve as a common response to the many — and sometimes scattered — ESG requests that smaller companies receive from their business partners³.

VSME — Voluntary Sustainability Reporting Standard for SMEs — is not, in other words, a new bureaucratic burden. It is a form of protection and a shared language. By producing a sustainability report in accordance with VSME, you ensure that the answers you give are comparable, credible, and actually useful to the recipient.

→ Try GoClimate's VSME tool

Your accounts as a data source

Your purchases of electricity, fuel, flights, office supplies, company car costs, and raw materials are already in your accounts. Every invoice from an electricity supplier contains information about energy consumption. Every petrol receipt tells you about fossil emissions. Every flight expense can be converted into carbon dioxide equivalents.

This is precisely the logic behind how modern sustainability reporting for SMEs works: instead of collecting data manually in separate spreadsheets, your accounting records can be automatically converted into climate data. Invoices and receipts are already structured — they have amounts, suppliers, and categories. That's enough to calculate a significant part of a company's climate impact.

What previously required a consultant and months of work can today be done on an ongoing basis, in parallel with ordinary bookkeeping.

→ Try GoClimate's automatic sustainability platform

What do you actually need to collect?

If you want to get started with sustainability reporting without turning it into a major project, focus on what delivers the greatest impact and what's already in your systems:

• Energy and electricity. How much electricity do you consume, and is it renewable? Your electricity supplier's invoices have the answer. A significant part of a company's climate impact is often hidden here, particularly in manufacturing and warehouse environments.
• Travel and transport. Business travel by air, rail, and road, as well as freight transport, are often the second largest source of emissions. These costs appear in expense reports and invoices.
• Purchasing and supply chain. What you buy — raw materials, input goods, IT equipment — creates climate impact at the supplier's end. This is called scope 3 and is the most difficult category to measure, but purchasing data can also provide a good estimate here. → Read more about how to think about sustainable purchasing
• Employees and working conditions. Number of employees, sick leave, gender distribution in management — this information is in your HR system and forms part of the social reporting in VSME.

Not a legal requirement — but a competitive advantage

For the vast majority of SMEs, there is no legal requirement for sustainability reporting today. Smaller companies are affected indirectly when customers, banks, or procurement bodies request ESG data⁴.

The difference from a few years ago is that "indirect impact" is now an understatement. A growing number of procurement processes include sustainability criteria as significant selection factors. Banks and credit institutions ask about climate impact ahead of lending decisions. And companies that themselves report under CSRD need your sustainability data for their sustainability report — if they don't want to wait for it, they'll choose a different supplier.

For companies that don't yet need to produce a sustainability report, VSME is a way to quickly and cost-effectively get sustainability data and processes in order. It reduces the risk of ad hoc solutions when customers and suppliers request detailed information, and makes it easier to scale up sustainability reporting if requirements increase in the future⁵.

In other words, it's not a question of whether you'll need it — but when.

How to get started without making it complicated

The simplest way to start is to treat sustainability data exactly as you treat financial data: on an ongoing basis, systematically, and integrated into what you already do.

In practice, this means:

• Categorising purchases so that energy, travel, and transport are clearly separated in your accounts
• Keeping records with the same care as receipts for tax purposes
• Choosing suppliers that can report their climate impact, particularly for electricity and transport
• Using a tool that automatically links accounting data with climate calculations and creates the basis for sustainability reporting

Tools built on invoice flows can collect and calculate emissions on an ongoing basis, without you needing to spend hours on manual data collection every quarter.

→ Try GoClimate's automatic sustainability platform

Sustainability data is business data

The most important insight is simple: sustainability data is not something that operates alongside your business. It is a reflection of how you run your company — who you buy from, how you travel, how you treat your employees.

And just as financial key figures help you make better decisions about revenues and costs, sustainability data helps you make better decisions about resource use, supplier selection, and risk exposure. A well-produced sustainability report is therefore not just a response to external demands — it is a tool for understanding and improving the company's own goals.

Starting to collect that data today is no longer being ahead of the curve. It's stopping being behind it.

Want to see how it works in practice? GoClimate's sustainability reporting tool automatically collects climate data from your invoices and receipts — and creates a sustainability report that meets the VSME standard. Try GoClimate for free →