customer asks how many employees with disabilities we have

Number of employees with disabilities, broken down by length of service

This is not a question you simply pull from your HR system: VSME does not ask for a single figure, but for a breakdown. The basic module asks for the proportion of employees with disabilities, and also how long they have been employed. If you don't have that breakdown, the most honest answer is that you know the total but not the distribution by length of service, rather than presenting an estimate as a hard figure.

Many companies don't record this at all, and that is in itself not a problem — there is no legal obligation to keep this data, only a question that customers can ask. When filling this in, also pay attention to the definition: "disability" is broader than an official disability status, and whether someone has themselves registered as such is up to the employee. This touches on the same kind of sensitivity as with the male-female distribution within the workforce: you fill in what you know, not what you assume.

Where this comes from: the social indicators of the VSME

This question appears in the basic module of EFRAG VSME, under the social indicators on your own employees. The VSME is a voluntary standard, designed to give SMEs a uniform answer to the questionnaires that larger customers — often themselves required under Directive (EU) 2022/2464 (CSRD) — send down the chain. That "voluntary" does not mean the question is non-binding once it lands on your desk: your customer asks it, and you decide for yourself what you share and what you don't. This indicator is substantively part of the same category as training hours per employee and the questions about collective agreement coverage — all part of the same "own personnel" block in the standard.