If you receive a sustainability questionnaire from a client, your bank or insurer as an installation company, certain questions almost always come up: about your vehicle fleet, about the materials you process, and about the work your technicians perform on-site at the customer's location. This is no coincidence. These three elements directly affect the emissions and the risk that a larger customer must account for in its own reporting, and they are relatively straightforward to substantiate with documents you likely already have.
The questionnaire itself varies depending on who sends it, but the core is often the same for installation companies. Below is what you can expect, and where the limit lies of what may be asked.
The vehicle fleet: the most common question
For an installation company, the corporate vehicle fleet is usually the largest direct emissions source, and therefore also the area where most questionnaires begin. You are typically asked about the number of vehicles, the fuel type (diesel, petrol, electric or hybrid) and annual fuel consumption. You usually get the latter from the invoices of your fuel card or from your mileage records if you already keep those for work-related personal mobility. Companies that already fall under the existing registration obligation for work-related personal mobility have thus already done part of this work; those figures are often reusable with minor adjustments for the ESG questionnaire.
Materials and procurement
A second recurring section covers the materials you process: pipework, insulation, heating boilers, solar panels, cables. Customers often ask whether you know where these materials come from, whether your suppliers provide sustainability information themselves, and sometimes whether you dispose of scrap material and packaging waste separately. For a small or medium-sized installation company, this does not need to be an extensive value chain analysis; the VSME standard is deliberately limited for this type of question. If you want to know exactly what level of detail applies to your company size, the overview by subject by theme shows what may and may not be asked.
On-site work at the customer's location
What distinguishes installation companies from, for example, construction, is that much of the work does not take place on your own business premises but at the customer's home or business location. Questionnaires therefore sometimes ask how you limit travel time and distance between jobs, or whether technicians use shared transport, and whether there is a policy for combining trips. These types of questions relate to scope 1 and 2, the direct emissions from your own business operations, and are usually well-supported by the route or planning records you already use.
Staff and safety
Because technicians perform physical work, often at third-party locations, personnel questions come up regularly in this sector: the number of employees, the number of workplace accidents, and sometimes whether there is basic safety policy for on-site work. These are usually figures that are already in your payroll administration or absence records and that are complete with a brief explanation.
The limit: what a customer may not ask
Since March 2026, the chain requirement applies: a reporting company may not demand more from a supplier with one thousand employees or fewer than what is in the VSME standard. For installation companies, this concretely means that extensive value chain analyses of sub-contractors, detailed CO2 calculations per project or historical data series spanning years may not be imposed as an obligation if they fall outside that standard. This is not a free pass to ignore questions, but it is grounds for using appropriate language when a question goes beyond what may be asked.
How you handle this in practice
Most installation companies receiving such a questionnaire for the first time recognize themselves in the above questions even though they don't yet know exactly which answers they need to provide and from which document. A brief check often quickly shows which part of the questionnaire can be answered with existing documents and which part may fall outside the standard. With the quick scan of five questions you can see that within a few minutes, without needing to create an account. If you first want to know where the data in the dossier comes from and how traceability is arranged, then the methodology page that explains it step by step.
Anyone who, after the first questionnaire, also wants to know what makes a next round faster, or what happens if an emission factor or the standard itself changes, will find that in frequently asked questions about the dossier.