If your company just left the scope of the EU's sustainability reporting law, the data demands from your biggest customers are not going to stop. That is the part the celebrations missed.
The first Omnibus Directive entered into force in March 2026 and cut the law, the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive or CSRD, back to companies above 1,000 employees and €450 million turnover. Thousands of mid-sized firms that had spent two years preparing closed the project the week the ink dried.
But CSRD makes large companies report on their whole supply chains, and the supply chains are, to a first approximation, the companies that just left scope.
What you lost, and what you kept
You lost the duty to publish your own sustainability statement under the EU's detailed standard. The questionnaires keep coming anyway, and so do the requests for Scope 3 data, the emissions a customer must report from its suppliers' operations rather than its own. And the scrutiny has sharpened, because the auditors who check your customers' reports now test the supplier data behind them.
Implementation surveys have consistently found supplier data availability to be the top supply-chain-emissions challenge, cited by around 79% of reporters. The pressure lands on you next, with sharper questionnaires and less patience.
The requests also arrive in worse shape. Heading into scope, one dataset built to the common standard served every customer. Now each customer sends its own format, thresholds and deadlines. The homework survived. The syllabus was withdrawn.
The machinery was built for one report a year
Reports of practice under the law put spreadsheet reliance among sustainability reporters above 90%, and that machinery was built for one hand-assembled annual report. Point it at a monthly stream of customer requests and it produces what it was built to produce. One heroic effort, per request.
Build the facts once
The mistake available right now is to treat each questionnaire as a small reporting project. Every request draws on the same underlying facts, so build the facts once:
- A data foundation, not a document. Energy use, emissions, workforce, materials and site data kept continuously, each figure able to show where it came from, so any questionnaire is answered from the same audited numbers.
- Ready for the next layer down. The same logic that reached you will reach your own suppliers, because your customers' questions include their inputs.
- One source, so you never contradict yourself. Five customers asking overlapping questions in five formats will otherwise get five subtly different answers, each defensible alone, contradictory together, and discoverable.
Count the hours your team spent on the last three customer ESG questionnaires, and how many answers were assembled fresh each time. If the second number is not near zero, the foundation is missing. Building it once, with every figure carrying its own paper trail, is what the Prophesee Compliance Suite is for. Serve the next request from a system.