An ESG report your enterprise customers and investors will accept

Who asks tech companies about ESG?

Mostly two groups: enterprise customers and investors. Large customers increasingly expect to report emissions across their supply chain, known as Scope 3, so their supplier onboarding now includes ESG questions next to the security and data protection checks. Your SaaS subscription is part of their footprint.

Investors are the other source. Some UK VCs send a short ESG questionnaire during due diligence and track a few measures each year after investing. If you sell into public sector contracts above £5 million a year, a Carbon Reduction Plan may also be required.

The questions repeat across all of them: your footprint, your policies, how you treat your team, how you handle data, and who is responsible.

What makes up a software company’s carbon footprint?

For a typical small tech company, the footprint is modest and comes from a few places:

• Electricity in your office, or your share of a co-working space, estimated from desks and days used if you have no bills
• Gas heating, if you have your own office with a gas supply
• Flights to customers, conferences and team offsites, calculated with radiative forcing included
• Rail for client visits and travel between offices
• Waste and water, estimated from bins and headcount where you lack data
• Commuting and homeworking, estimated from how often your team comes in or works from home

Now the honest part. Cloud hosting counts as a purchased service under Scope 3. The questionnaire can include it as a spend-based estimate within your software, IT, cloud and telecoms spend, but that is a rough figure based on what you pay, not provider-specific data. Commuting and homeworking are estimates too, and the methodology appendix spells out exactly what is in and out. If a buyer asks for more accurate cloud emissions, ask your hosting provider what data it can give you.

How tech teams usually reduce their footprint

For a small software business, flights tend to dominate once you start measuring. A long-haul return flight in economy, London to New York for example, comes to roughly 1.3 tonnes of CO2e per passenger using the 2026 UK government factors with radiative forcing included. In business class it is nearly three times that. That makes travel policy the most effective lever: rail for UK and near-Europe trips, fewer people per conference, and grouping customer visits.

Electricity is the next one. If you control your own office, a renewable tariff backed by REGOs reduces your market-based Scope 2 figure to zero, and the report shows both the location-based and market-based numbers. In a co-working space, it is worth asking the operator what tariff they are on.

Your private action plan puts these in order for your business, so you have a credible answer when a customer asks what you are doing next.

Getting it done this week

Have your headcount, desk numbers, any staff benefits and a rough count of last year’s flights and train trips to hand. Answers save as you go, so you can pause and come back later. Your first report is free. For more on distributed teams, see ESG for remote and hybrid teams, or start your report now.