I don't have time to complete that entire ESG questionnaire

Time pressure is mainly about repetition, not about the questions themselves

Most ESG questionnaires ask for the same basic data you already have stored somewhere: company size, locations, policies, certificates. The time lost is not in coming up with answers, but in repeatedly having to find and retype them for each portal separately. Whoever uses EFRAG's VSME baseline module as a reference will see that it largely consists of fields that are identical for every customer: how many employees the undertaking has, in which countries it operates and whether there is a continuity plan exists. These are not questions that differ per customer, so they only need to be answered correctly once.

What does take time is the section where you have to provide supporting documentation that you don't have readily available: an emissions figure, an audit report, a supplier declaration. For those fields there is no faster answer than actually finding it — filling in an estimate without substantiation will generate more questions from your customer on the first spot check than it saves you now. More practical is to split the list: handle the standard fields once from a fixed supply chain file, and only look up the deviating or missing points separately. That usually saves most of the time, even though a small part remains that really requires research work.

Why these fields appear everywhere: the VSME structure

The fact that almost every ESG questionnaire contains the same basic fields is because customers usually base their own formats on EFRAG's VSME baseline module, which was developed as a light reporting standard for non-listed SMEs following Directive (EU) 2022/2464 (CSRD). This module is built from a fixed base section — size, locations, policies — and a number of topic-specific modules that may differ by sector. This explains why the core of the questionnaire is predictable, while the detailed questions can be worded slightly differently per customer.