It is worth describing the engagement honestly, because the caricature — expensive people producing a glossy document — is unfair and also unhelpful.
A good ESG consultant brings three things you almost certainly do not have in-house on a first cycle: familiarity with the frameworks, judgement about materiality and boundary, and pattern recognition from having done this for other companies in your sector. Those are genuinely valuable and they are the reason the engagement is worth its fee.
The problem is the other 70% of the time. Collection, chasing, unit conversion, reconciliation, formatting, rebuilding the workbook, and translating your operations into their template. That work is identical across every client they serve, it scales with your site count, and you are paying professional rates for it.
Which is the actual argument. Not that consultants are overpriced — that the manual portion of the work is the large portion, and it is the portion a system removes.
| Consultant-led | Platform-led | |
|---|---|---|
| Year one | Full scope, full fee. The learning is priced in and you pay for it. | Licence plus setup. Your team does more of the collection and learns the process. |
| Year two | Re-scoped and re-quoted. Often close to year one because the method lives with them. | A rollover. Sites, meters, suppliers, methods and templates already exist. |
| Year three | Similar again, plus scope creep as Scope 3 widens. | Marginal. The incremental work is the new categories only. |
| If a figure is challenged | You ask the consultant, who may no longer be engaged. | You open the figure and see the calculation, the factor version and the source document. |
| If the relationship ends | You keep the report and, if you asked, a workbook. | You export the full dataset including evidence documents. |
These are not hedges. If any of them describes you, engage one — and we will say the same on a call.
The framing of consultant versus platform is largely a false choice, and the companies that handle first cycles best do not accept it.
They engage a consultant for the judgement: boundary, materiality assessment, Scope 3 scoping, target credibility, assurance readiness. Those are days of senior time, not weeks of junior time, and they are worth full rate.
They run the mechanical work — collection, calculation, evidence, report assembly — in a system their own team owns. That work happens continuously through the year rather than in a compressed engagement, which is also when it is cheapest to do.
The result is a lower total fee, a shorter engagement, and a method that stays in the company rather than leaving with the consultant. Our partner programme exists specifically to make that arrangement work, and firms that adopt it keep the high-value work when clients eventually bring reporting in-house.
From the effort model in our cost comparison tool: a base of 18 days plus 6 days per entity, 1.5 per site, and 12 if Scope 3 is in scope, priced at your consultant rate, against a licence plus reduced internal time. Every assumption is visible and editable. If it does not match what you have been quoted, change the inputs — the model moves with you, and if it produces a different answer for you then that is the answer.
They are right, and so does a consultant. Nobody can produce your meter readings for you. The difference is where that work happens: in a structured intake your site managers fill in monthly, or in an email thread the consultant runs in the final quarter. The second is more expensive and produces a weaker evidence trail.
Yes — that is exactly what the Firm tier is for. Many advisers prefer it because it removes the workbook overhead from their engagement and lets them bill for judgement instead.
Bring the workbook in. Imported figures carry a note that they came from a spreadsheet rather than a source document, so your assurance provider can see which figures have evidence behind them and which do not. That distinction is worth preserving rather than smoothing over.
A summary of a regulation is not the regulation. These are the primary documents this page is based on.
Four questions, and you get the year you first file, the framework, and what to collect first.
Plain-language explainers of the FRC and SEC rules, ISSB S1 & S2, and what each asks you to disclose.
What a consultant-led reporting cycle costs against an annual licence, in Naira.
