Our suppliers are small. Is this too much to ask of them?
The portal is built for someone who has never been asked this before. No account, no login, and each question explains what it means and why you are asking. Most answers come from a utility bill and a headcount. Where a supplier genuinely cannot answer, that is recorded as an absence rather than left as a gap you discover later.
What if a supplier does not respond?
You see who has not replied and the platform follows up. Where no figure arrives, the category is estimated from the spend you recorded and marked as an estimate, so the split between reported and estimated is visible to you and to anyone checking your inventory.
Does CS3D apply to us?
Almost certainly not. Since Directive (EU) 2026/470 there is a single scope tier, and an EU company is caught only with more than 5,000 employees and more than EUR 1.5bn net worldwide turnover. A non-EU company is caught on more than EUR 1.5bn turnover generated in the EU, with no employee test. Scope can also be reached through group parentage and through franchising or licensing arrangements, which this platform does not assess. What reaches you instead is the request: your in-scope customers cannot diligence a value chain they have no information about, so they will ask, and they will ask before their own deadline of 26 July 2029 rather than on it. A company in scope may seek information from a business partner with fewer than 5,000 employees only where that information is not publicly available and is necessary to address a salient issue.
Transposition is what turns these dates into national obligations, and it has not happened in earnest yet. Member States transpose by 26 July 2028. The Commission is due to publish implementation guidelines before 26 July 2027, and they are not published at the time of writing. Both will change how the questionnaires you receive are worded, so treat the wording of a request as your customer's reading of the directive rather than as the directive.
How does this connect to our Scope 3 inventory?
Supplier figures feed Category 1 directly, each carrying the basis it came in on and whether the supplier told you their own reporting is third-party assured. Where a supplier’s stated assurance disagrees with the figure they gave, that is flagged rather than reconciled silently.