Every cost comparison you will read, including the ones vendors publish, compares a licence fee against a consultant fee. That comparison is incomplete in a way that consistently favours whoever is writing it.
The missing line is your own team’s time. A consultant cannot find your meter readings, cannot chase your site managers, and cannot explain your own operations to you. That work stays internal in both models, and on a first cycle it is substantial — frequently comparable to the external fee once you price it at a loaded rate.
We model it on both sides. The platform-led figure assumes 30% of the total effort stays internal; the consultant-led figure assumes 45%. A platform reduces internal effort because collection is structured and recurring; it does not eliminate it, and any model showing internal cost going to zero is selling you something.
Illustrative structure rather than a quote. Run the tool with your own figures for numbers you can take to a budget meeting.
| Cost line | Consultant-led | Platform-led | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| External fee | Effort × day rate | Annual licence | The only line most comparisons show |
| Your team’s time | ~45% of total effort | ~30% of total effort | Priced at a loaded internal day rate |
| Setup / onboarding | Included in the engagement | Included in the licence | Historic year reconstruction is extra in both |
| Year two | Re-scoped and re-quoted | Rollover, same licence | Where the models diverge most |
| Assurance | Separate | Separate | Driven by evidence quality, not by delivery model |
| Cost of a challenged figure | Re-engage, or reconstruct | Open the figure | Rarely budgeted, occasionally large |
Assurance is excluded from both sides deliberately. It is driven almost entirely by how traceable your evidence is rather than by who produced the report.
Entity count, site count, whether Scope 3 is in scope, your consultant day rate and your internal loaded rate. Every assumption in the effort model is shown and editable — if ours does not match your experience, change it and see what the answer becomes.
It is what our effort model produces for a typical single-entity, multi-site Nigerian company in year one, and the gap widens in year two. It is a model, not a promise. The honest version is: run it with your own rates, and if it does not produce that answer for your shape then that is your answer.
Assurance fees, historic year reconstruction, and any advisory work on materiality, boundary or strategy. All three are real and all three are better quoted specifically than modelled generically.
Three-year total cost, both models, with internal time priced. A one-year licence-versus-fee comparison is the framing that invites the question ‘and what about next year’, which you want to have answered before it is asked.
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.
