The VSME standard is not mandatory for the vast majority of SMEs. Yet many smaller businesses do receive a questionnaire based on VSME, because their customer uses it to collect sustainability data from suppliers. Whether the standard is relevant to your business therefore does not depend on your own obligation, but on what your customer needs.
VSME stands for Voluntary Sustainability Reporting Standard for SMEs: a voluntary reporting standard, developed by EFRAG, specifically designed for businesses that do not fall under the CSRD themselves. The standard provides a fixed set of questions and definitions, so that a large customer does not have to devise its own format for each supplier. In that sense, VSME is more of a tool for the requesting party than an obligation for the receiving party.
What VSME actually is
The CSRD (Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive) requires a group of larger enterprises to report on sustainability, using an extensive standard full of indicators. Those larger enterprises in turn need data from their own suppliers, in order to report on their chain. Because the full CSRD standard is too burdensome for a small business, EFRAG developed VSME as a lighter, voluntary alternative. Businesses that are not themselves subject to CSRD can use this standard to answer a customer's questions in a structured manner, without an obligation of their own behind it. For more on what such a questionnaire contains and how it is structured, see the overview of sustainability concepts in the knowledge base.
Why your customer still asks for it
A customer that falls under the CSRD must often also report on so-called scope 3 emissions: the indirect emissions that arise from suppliers and other chain partners. To compile those figures, the customer sends a questionnaire to its own suppliers, even if those suppliers are not themselves subject to CSRD. VSME is then the format that the customer chooses, simply because it is a recognized, uniform standard. For you as recipient, little changes in terms of content: you receive a list of questions about energy consumption, waste, personnel policy and the like, and you answer them based on data that you presumably have already recorded somewhere.
When there are own obligations
Whether your business itself falls under the CSRD depends on criteria regarding number of employees, turnover and balance sheet total, as laid down in the directive. For most SMEs, that is not the case, and then completing a VSME questionnaire remains a choice: you can choose to cooperate with your customer's request, but there is no independent legal obligation to do so. If you want to know for certain whether your business does fall under the CSRD, that is something to check against the official text of the directive or to discuss with an adviser. If you are uncertain whether a questionnaire you receive is based on VSME or on something else, then the recognition check in a few questions provides an initial indication.
What this means in practice for filling in
Because VSME has a fixed, recognizable structure, the same questions often come up with different customers: about energy consumption, water consumption, personnel composition and basic policy agreements. This makes it attractive to record the answers properly once and reuse them each time, instead of filling in each questionnaire from scratch. Supplia.eu recognizes VSME-based questions in an uploaded list and supplements them with answers from your supply chain file; you confirm each answer yourself with yes or no and submit the list to your customer's portal. We do not review the list for content and do not log in anywhere on your behalf. How that recognition works exactly and where the information comes from is explained on the page about how the system works.
If you have recently received a questionnaire and are unsure whether VSME is relevant here, or if you have any other questions about completing it, you will find more examples and explanations in the frequently asked questions. If you first want to get a broader picture of where your company stands among the various questionnaires currently in circulation, the free quick-scan is a low-threshold first step.