The pressure on SMEs rarely arrives as a regulation. It arrives as a questionnaire: from a bank, an insurer, a large customer's procurement portal. VSME is EFRAG's voluntary standard built exactly for this: one small-company report that those counterparties recognise, instead of a different form every quarter.
Answer the standard once. Point everyone at it.
Every VSME datapoint comes with ready answers to pick from, written from official sources, in plain language. You choose the one that fits, edit it to match your company, done. The blank-page problem, which is most of why SME reports never get finished, is gone.
| B3 · ENERGY | READY ANSWER | STATE |
|---|---|---|
| electricity mix | We purchase electricity through our grid operator; renewable share follows the national residual mix. | Picked · edited |
| consumption | Annual consumption is read from utility invoices, entered per site. | Picked |
| reduction actions | Choose from 4 ready answers or write your own. | Open |
Picked, edited, yours.
Your answers form a record, not a document: headcount, energy, sites, policies, incidents, each fact in one place with its evidence attached. The VSME report renders from it. So does the answer to the next bank form and the next customer portal, because they ask the same facts in different clothes.
The next questionnaire is a lookup.
Basic module or Comprehensive module, in the VSME structure counterparties recognise, exported and shareable. When something changes next year, you update the facts that changed and render again. Nothing rebuilt from scratch, nothing retyped.
This year's report is next year's starting point.