my customer wants me to return the sustainability list quickly, how do I do that

A week is feasible if the supply chain file is already in place

Yes, that is usually possible — but not because the deadline is flexible, since the customer sets it themselves. It is about what a sustainability questionnaire requires in practice. Most questionnaires that customers send are not literal CSRD reporting according to Directive (EU) 2022/2464, but a condensed set based on the EFRAG VSME standard module: company data, energy and emissions, personnel policy, and sometimes a few governance questions. Once those answers have been recorded, completing the form is a matter of recognition and confirmation, not a matter of recalculating.

The time-consuming part is never the typing, it is reconstructing figures that are not centrally stored anywhere: scope 1 and 2, the number of fte, turnover per site country. If that is already in the file, then a week is more than sufficient — the system recognises the question, displays the answer with date and source, and the entrepreneur confirms or rejects it. If a figure is missing, then the delay is not the list but the answer itself: someone must provide it before the system can display it. Standard basic data such as the number of employees and the countries in which the company has establishments are usually already known and thus not a bottleneck; energy data and scope 3 estimates more often so.

What the questionnaire itself tests

The reasoning for this does not follow from a legal deadline — it is not stated anywhere for this type of customer questionnaire — but from the nature of the questions themselves. The EFRAG VSME standard module is built up from fixed categories that recur with almost every customer, even if the format differs. Once someone has fully completed those categories once, they only need to check on the next list whether anything has changed since last time.