A construction company's first sustainability report essentially contains three components: the data that affects your own business operations (energy, fuel, personnel), the data specific to construction (material use and transport to the construction site), and an answer to the questions your client has actually asked. It is not a document you build from a blank standard, but an elaboration of the figures you already have on hand.
The order matters here. First, you check which questions have been asked and whether they fall within the VSME standard — the voluntary European standard for unlisted SMEs. Only then do you complete the report with the figures you already have: an energy bill, fuel receipts, a printout from your payroll administration. The report is the capstone, not the starting point.
What a baseline report in construction typically contains
For a construction company, most questions concern energy and fuel consumption, the vehicle fleet and equipment at the construction site, and the number of employees and the nature of their employment. These are the components that appear in virtually every questionnaire, regardless of which customer, bank or insurer asks the questions. In addition, clients in construction often specifically ask about material use and how materials and personnel reach the construction site. Which components exactly apply to your company depends on your size and who sends the questionnaire; in a few questions see which components apply to your business provides an initial direction for this, without you having to set up a file right away.
Material use: what you record and what you don't
Material use is the most challenging part for many construction companies, because it doesn't appear on a single invoice. Procurement data for concrete, steel, wood and insulation materials give an initial picture of quantities, but say nothing in themselves about the associated emissions. For a basic report, it is common practice to work with the quantities that can be extracted from procurement records, supplemented with established emission factors with a reference date. What a client may ask for beyond that in terms of detail — for example per supplier or per construction project — is subject to a limit that has been set in the sustainability reporting directive since March 2026. Which components of the VSME standard apply to material use are set out clearly at the topics that have been worked through per situation.
Transport to the construction site
The second recurring component is transport: own delivery vans and trucks, hired transport of materials, and commuting by staff to changing construction sites. For own vehicles, fuel receipts and mileage records usually form the basis. For hired transport, it is common practice to work with what the carrier itself provides, or in the absence of that, with an estimate based on distance and weight. This component often overlaps with a record that already existed for work-related staff mobility, and that overlap is precisely why completing a questionnaire becomes faster as you build up a file.
The client's requirements as a guide
Because the VSME standard allows room for different levels of detail, in practice the client's questionnaire determines how detailed a baseline report will be. A large contractor who is itself subject to reporting obligations typically asks different questions than a bank assessing financing. The report you prepare is therefore not a fixed template but a document that moves with whoever requests it — with the proviso that what a buyer with a thousand employees or fewer may ask for cannot go beyond what the VSME standard permits.
From loose figures to one document
The step from loose figures to a report you can share is mainly a matter of recording: which source belongs with which figure, and which assumption was made where exact data was not available. That recording is also what makes a next questionnaire faster, because the dossier remains in place and is not rebuilt from scratch. how the data from your own documents are extracted shows which sources are used for this and where the limit lies of what the platform does and does not fill in for you — a baseline report is explicitly not an audit, certificate or mark of approval, and a recognised body for these SME reports does not exist at this time.
Would you like to see where your business stands before you start with a report? The free quick scan gives a first indication in a few questions, and anyone who prefers to get straight to work with a dossier can create a business account to build the questionnaire and report from documents you already have.