Voluntary Standards for SMEs

VSME enables small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to disclose sustainability-related information in a comprehensive and standardized format. Adoption of the standard further aims to reduce the burden associated with sustainability data requests from financial institutions and value-chain partners. Nevertheless, application of the standard remains entirely voluntary.

Timeline

Structure

The VSME framework consists of two modules that organizations can employ to prepare their sustainabilty report:

• Basic Module: This module captures essential and general information, as well as foundational sustainability metrics. The datapoints included represent the minimum reporting requirement for undertakings.

• Comprehensive Module: This module expands upon the Basic Module by incorporating additional, more detailed datapoints. These enhanced disclosures are designed to meet the information needs of external stakeholders such as banks, investors and other capital providers.

Supporting documents

In order to ease report preparation, EFRAG provides a digital template in an Excel format. Additionally, the XBRL Taxonomy enables the digitalisation of reported data, designed to harmonize data requests and further processing of the data by stakeholders. Finally, EFRAG developed additional implementation guidance to further explain reporting requiremts. All the documents listed above can be found in the EFRAG VSME ecosystem.