The spreadsheet has arrived: Scopes 1, 2, and 3, base year, methodology, whether third-party verification has been conducted, reduction targets, and carbon intensity per unit produced. The deadline is tight, half the fields require data that no one in the company has collected, and there is a temptation to fill in the blanks with estimates rather than leave anything unanswered. The right approach is the opposite: report accurately only what you measure, specify the methodology and base year for each figure, and clearly identify what is not yet measured, along with a timeline for starting to measure it. A partial but honest emissions inventory scores better than a complete spreadsheet that cannot withstand scrutiny, because someone on the receiving end is comparing your answers with those of competitors and industry benchmarks.
Understanding why the questionnaire arrived helps you respond more effectively. Your customer has probably committed to an emissions reduction target and discovered, during the calculation process, that most of its emissions do not come from its own operations. They come from its supply chain, which falls under Scope 3 in its emissions inventory. This means the emissions your company generates to produce what the customer purchases become part of its carbon footprint. Your response will likely circulate internally among procurement, sustainability, and, depending on the company’s size, auditing teams. This is not a marketing questionnaire. It is a technical input for emissions calculations, comparable to any data supporting a properly structured carbon credit strategy, and increasingly integrated into sector-specific applications where supply chain pressure has already become routine.
The structure of these questionnaires is fairly standardized, which makes the process easier. Scope 1 covers emissions your operations generate or release directly: fuel consumed by company-owned vehicles, gas burned in furnaces and boilers, refrigerant gases, and industrial processes. Scope 2 covers purchased energy, primarily electricity. Scope 3 covers the rest of the value chain, including purchased materials, outsourced transportation, waste, business travel, and the use of sold products. Beyond these three scopes, questionnaires usually include fields for the methodology adopted, base year, whether the figures have been verified, whether a public reduction target exists, and carbon intensity per physical unit or unit of revenue. This last field is often the one that most frequently eliminates suppliers from consideration because it allows customers to compare two companies in the same industry regardless of their size.
The first serious mistake is inventing numbers. The people reviewing these responses have industry benchmarks for comparison, and a figure that falls significantly outside the expected range will not go unnoticed. It will trigger a request for supporting calculations, precisely the documentation that does not exist when a number has been hastily estimated. The damage goes beyond losing points in the assessment. Your company may be placed on a list of suppliers whose information requires additional verification, increasing the cost of the relationship for the customer and weakening your position in future negotiations.
The second mistake is answering “not applicable” to a field that applies to your company but is not currently measured. These are two different situations, and evaluators know the difference. “We do not currently measure Scope 3 emissions; we will begin collecting data on purchased materials and transportation during the next reporting cycle” is a professional response that demonstrates awareness of your own processes. Marking a clearly applicable field as “not applicable” signals a lack of understanding, which, in this context, is interpreted as risk.
The third mistake is less visible and more common: different people providing inconsistent answers. The sales team completes a questionnaire in March, the technical team completes another in August using different criteria, and the customer receives two incompatible versions of the same company’s emissions data. The solution is simple to describe but requires discipline to maintain: appoint one person responsible for these responses and establish a single source of data containing the current figures, the methodology used, and the date of the most recent update. This also makes the information reusable, because the next customer will ask the same questions.
When the deadline is tight, the order of priorities is clear. Scopes 1 and 2 are the quickest to compile with reasonable accuracy because they rely on information the company already has somewhere: fuel invoices, electricity bills, and gas consumption records. Scope 3 requires more work and can be reported as partial, initially covering the most significant categories, typically purchased materials and transportation. Declaring partial coverage and specifying exactly what is included and excluded is acceptable in virtually all supplier assessment programs. Omitting an emissions scope without explanation is not.
Another common misconception is worth addressing: purchasing carbon credits does not answer the questionnaire. Your customer wants to know how much your company emits and what its emissions reduction trajectory looks like, not how much it has offset. Carbon offsetting is legitimate supplementary information, but it belongs in a separate field and never replaces gross emissions data. From the customer’s emissions inventory perspective, what matters is the emissions factor associated with what it purchases from your company, not your carbon credit portfolio.
The strategic point is that this pressure will only increase. Large corporate customers will continue requesting emissions data, banks assess climate risk when granting credit, and sectors entering Brazil’s regulated carbon market will pass data requirements along to their entire supply chains. Companies that organize these figures once can transform a recurring inconvenience into a barrier to entry for competitors that still improvise their responses. They also avoid repeatedly discovering, just before a deadline, that they do not know how much they emit.
If one of these questionnaires is sitting on your desk right now, you can still respond effectively without having measured everything, provided your response is structured and transparent about its limitations. GETS CARBON helps your company establish this data foundation once and use it for every subsequent request, with documented methodologies and defensible figures. Speak with a GETS CARBON specialist and turn your next customer questionnaire into a competitive advantage.
