Start with what you consume yourself, not what you process
For a construction company, the request for a CO2 figure quickly feels like a request for the entire project: the concrete, the steel, the client's trucks. That is not where you start. The VSME standard, the voluntary EU standard for non-listed small and medium-sized enterprises, first asks in basic terms what your own company consumes: fuel for your own equipment and company vehicles, and the electricity of your office and workshop. That is the overview you can create with the documents you already have.
The order is therefore: own fuel consumption, own electricity consumption, and only then — if the standard or your client specifically asks for it — a look at material use and transport to the construction site. Those who start with the last two become entangled in figures that a supplier or subcontractor should actually provide, and that is precisely the part where many construction companies get stuck.
Which invoices do you compare first
For the first overview, you need three types of documents. Fuel receipts or a fuel card statement for equipment such as cranes, shovels and generators. The energy bill for your office, warehouse or workshop, with the annual consumption in kilowatt hours. And, if company vehicles run on diesel or petrol, the fuel receipts for those separately from the equipment — this distinction makes it easier later to answer questions about the vehicle fleet and questions about equipment separately.
These three documents together give a consumption in litres and kilowatt hours. That consumption is converted using an established emission factor into kilograms of CO2. How that conversion works exactly, and how you read which figure belongs to which fuel type, is explained in the article on Calculate CO2 from your energy bill. That is the calculation step; this article covers what you additionally need to gather for a construction company specifically.
Material use: what belongs and what does not belong in the first overview
Concrete, steel and timber all have their own CO2 footprint, and that footprint is created largely at the manufacturer, not by you. In the basic report of the VSME standard, that is part of what the standard calls scope 3: emissions that occur outside your own business operations, at suppliers and subcontractors. For a small or medium-sized construction company, that is usually not the part where you yourself produce figures; it is the part where you, if a client or bank asks for it, fall back on what the supplier of the concrete or steel provides.
What you can record yourself is which quantities of material were processed in a project and which supplier they came from. That is not a CO2 figure, but it is the basis on which a more accurate figure can be built later, once the supplier shares that information or the sector establishes shared benchmarks for it.
Transport to the construction site
The transport of material to the construction site falls into the same category: it is emissions that do not appear in your own fuel receipts, because a supplier or transporter makes that trip. If your own company vehicle transports material with your own fuel, that belongs to your own consumption and is already counted in the first step. If the supplier transports it themselves, that is basically their emissions, not yours.
The distinction between what is yours and what is part of the chain is precisely where most confusion arises in a questionnaire. The article on scope 1, 2 and 3 and what you provide to your client goes deeper into that classification.
What a client may then ask
A client, bank or insurer may ask follow-up questions about materials and transport, particularly for larger projects. Since March 2026, there is a limit: a reporting-obligated buyer may not demand more sustainability information from a supplier with one thousand employees or fewer than what is set out in the VSME standard. Whether a specific question about material sourcing or transport routes falls within that limit depends on how the question is formulated precisely; you are best placed to assess this on a question-by-question basis, rather than on the basis of a general impression of the questionnaire.
To see whether a specific question falls within the VSME standard, you can set the question alongside the standard. An initial indication of where your company stands is provided by a few questions that immediately give direction.
Setting it down for next time
Whether you now remain at the first step — your own fuel and electricity — or also bring material use and transport into view, the overview you are now building has value for the next questionnaire. A bank, insurer or new client often asks largely the same questions. How such a file is retained and what is needed for that, you can read on the page about where the figures in the file come from.
Would you like to see where your company stands before you start collecting invoices? Do the free quick-scan or read through the topics at your leisure — both are accessible without an account.