Häufig gestellte Fragen
Who is required to do ESG reporting in Germany?
The reporting obligation derives primarily from the EU's CSRD directive, whose scope was significantly reduced by the so-called Omnibus package at the beginning of 2026. Under the current status, the core group of mandatory reporters going forward comprises companies with more than 1,000 employees and more than 450 million euros in net revenue, while many smaller companies fall out of the mandatory scope. Since transposition into national law is still pending and detailed deadlines may shift, companies should have their specific status assessed individually. Regardless of any legal obligation, banks, major customers or investors often request ESG data even from mid-sized companies that are not directly affected.
What do Scope 1, 2 and 3 mean in ESG reporting?
The three scopes come from the internationally established Greenhouse Gas Protocol and classify greenhouse gas emissions by their origin. Scope 1 covers direct emissions from owned or controlled sources, for example from the company's own vehicle fleet or on-site boilers, while Scope 2 captures indirect emissions from purchased energy such as electricity, heat or steam. Scope 3 covers all remaining indirect emissions along the value chain and is divided into 15 categories in the GHG Protocol, including purchased goods, business travel and the use of sold products. Scope 3 is considered the hardest to collect, because much of the data comes from suppliers and partners.
Do I need a dedicated ESG tool or is the ERP enough?
Whether a specialised tool is necessary depends on the extent of the obligations and the data landscape. With a CSRD obligation and distributed group structures, a dedicated solution often makes sense in practice, because the data flows in from several systems and must be evidenced in an audit-proof manner. Vendors such as SAP, Microsoft or Oracle offer their own sustainability modules, and there are also specialised ESG platforms that connect to the ERP via interfaces. What matters is less the product names than fundamental capabilities such as end-to-end data lineage, maintainable emission factors, aggregation across legal entities and audit-ready documentation.
Which data from the ERP system feeds into ESG reporting?
Many ESG metrics already exist in the ERP system anyway and merely need to be evaluated there in a structured way. Energy and material consumption typically comes from materials management and recorded energy bills, HR metrics such as accident rates or training hours come from the HR module, and travel and procurement data is supplied by purchasing. Using stored emission factors, consumption figures can be converted into CO2 equivalents, which is usually handled by complementary sustainability or EPM modules. In group structures, clean multi-entity capability and group-wide consolidation are prerequisites for turning distributed individual values into a consistent overall report.
Which standards is a sustainability report prepared under?
In the European mandatory context, the European Sustainability Reporting Standards (ESRS) are authoritative; they are prescribed as binding under the CSRD and, depending on the version, can comprise over a thousand data points. The voluntary GRI standards are also widely used internationally, but they only partially overlap with the ESRS, which is why GRI and EFRAG have published a dedicated interoperability index for mapping the two frameworks. For mid-sized companies not subject to mandatory reporting, the EU additionally had the voluntary VSME standard developed on behalf of the Commission, which enables leaner sustainability reporting. Which standard applies therefore depends on the mandatory status, the audience and the objective of the report.
Does an ESG report have to be externally audited?
With the CSRD obligation, an external audit requirement for the sustainability report generally applies as well, similar to the classic financial report. What is envisaged is an audit with limited assurance, in which auditors examine the reported data for plausibility with limited depth; the originally planned step up to a more in-depth audit with reasonable assurance was scrapped by the Omnibus package. Particular attention is paid to the double materiality analysis and to the quality and traceability of the collected data sets. For this reason, every value should be documented so it can be traced back to its source, so that the report holds up in the audit process.