The first sustainability reporting engagement is profitable because you priced it for the learning. The second is profitable because you reused the thinking. By the fifth, something has gone wrong: you are doing the same manual work five times, each in a different workbook, each with a slightly different method, and the only way to take a sixth is to hire.
That is not a knowledge problem. Your people know what a material Scope 3 category looks like. It is a repeatability problem: the method exists in their heads and in a file somewhere, rather than in a system that applies it the same way every time.
The consequence is that your capacity is bounded by headcount and your margin erodes with scale, in a market where demand is about to exceed the entire country’s supply of people who can do this work.
Each client’s sites, users and reporting years are separated, under one firm account with one invoice. Nothing crosses between them.
The same factor set and versions apply across every engagement, so two consultants cannot quietly use two methods and produce two defensible-looking answers.
Staff are assigned to the clients they work on. Rolling someone off an engagement removes their access to it, which is a question your own risk function will eventually ask.
Exports carry your firm’s or your client’s identity, generated from the same underlying disclosure rather than rebuilt in a template.
Which engagements are behind, which are waiting on client data, and which are ready for review — across the whole book, in one screen.
The approach that worked for one manufacturer is the starting position for the next, rather than a file someone has to find and remember to adapt.
Moving the mechanical work into a platform changes the shape of the engagement, and it is worth being clear about the direction.
It reduces what you can bill for collection, chasing and formatting. It increases what you can bill for judgement — materiality assessment, boundary decisions, Scope 3 scoping, target credibility, strategy narrative, assurance readiness — because you have time to do it and because the client can see it is the valuable part.
That trade is going to happen regardless of what any individual firm does, because clients eventually notice what they are paying for. The firms that make the trade deliberately keep the high-value work. The firms that do not lose the engagement entirely when the client brings reporting in-house, which some will.
Emvert sells software. Assurance, materiality assessment, strategy and transition planning are your work, and the Firm tier exists specifically so that preparing disclosures for clients is a supported use of the product rather than a workaround. Where a prospect needs advisory support we refer it out.
Exports can carry your firm’s or your client’s branding. The platform interface stays Emvert-branded — a client being handed an audit trail should be able to see which system produced it, and so should their assurance provider. We think that is the right line and we are not going to move it.
The client. If an engagement ends, their workspace and its evidence can be exported to them or transferred to a direct licence. We will not hold a company’s emissions history hostage to a commercial dispute between them and their adviser.
An annual licence in Naira, priced on the number of client workspaces rather than per seat — so adding a junior to an engagement does not change your bill. Exact pricing depends on portfolio size and a call ends with a written quote.
Yes, and it is your call rather than ours. Preparing a client’s disclosure and then assuring it raises the same independence questions as preparing and auditing financial statements. Firms typically separate the teams or decline one side. Take your own advice — but raise it early, because discovering it late costs an engagement.
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.
