which data from my payroll administration do I need to provide

Number of employees and hours worked are central

The data export you need focuses mainly on two things: how many people are employed and how many hours they have worked. For the basic module of the VSME standard, this concerns the number of employees, broken down by type of contract and sometimes by gender, plus data that provides insight into workforce composition. These are figures that are already available in virtually every payroll administration system, usually as an overview per period or per year.

In addition, part of the payroll administration may also be relevant for energy and emissions figures, for example if there is a company car arrangement or a travel expense allowance that can be traced in the salary administration. This does not affect the employee data itself, but rather the fuel and travel-related figures that are classified in the GHG Protocol as scope 1, 2 or 3. Anyone unsure whether a temporary worker or on-call worker counts towards the employee headcount will find a separate answer to that at does a temporary worker count towards my company's headcount. The entrepreneur reads the figures from their own data export and confirms what is in it themselves; this forms the basis of the dossier, just as it does for the energy bills and fuel receipts that are collected separately — see for example how do I get my fuel receipts into the esgia dossier.

As this follows from the VSME basic module

The basic module of the VSME standard calls for personnel data as part of the social indicators, alongside the environmental indicators for which energy bills and fuel data are used. Which additional questions a buyer may ask depends on what is in that standard versus what falls outside it — the cap check makes this distinction clear, as can be read at what exactly is esgia's capcheck. For the practical next steps, from data export to completed dossier, How do I approach this step by step? a summary of the individual steps.