30 questions to ask before choosing a sustainability software

Whether it’s to stay compliant with regulations, meet the demands of stakeholders, or achieve a more sustainable business in the long term, it’s becoming more and more important for your company to pay greater attention to its sustainability impact and performance.

However, with the amount of data that needs to be collected, analyzed, and reviewed, the different regulations, standards, and frameworks in place, and several other common problems faced during sustainability reporting, understanding your company’s sustainability performance is not a walk in the park – at least, not without the help of a digital solution!

Many companies are turning to sustainability softwares for help, and with the many different options currently available in the digital marketplace, you might want to arm yourself with better knowledge that will help you pick the right one before walking into the minefield of sustainability softwares.

To help you make a more informed decision in finding the sustainability software best suited to your company’s needs, we’ve compiled a list of 30 important questions to consider and clustered them into 6 main considerations:

1. What do YOU need in a sustainability software?

2. Is it simple and flexible?

3. Does it save you time and resources?

4. Does it increase the quality, transparency and traceability of your data?

5. What are the (hidden) costs?

6. Does it help you accelerate change?

1. What do YOU need in a sustainability software?

Before embarking on your quest to find a suitable sustainability software, you need to understand your company's needs – now, and in the future.

Are you looking for a software to:

• automate data management

• manage and track your team within the same platform

• calculate and manage your carbon footprint

• visualize your data on dashboards,

• or better yet – something that can do all of the above?

Where are you today regarding sustainability? Do you already have a sustainability software in place, but you’re not quite satisfied with how it’s worked for you, or are you just getting started? Would you prefer a sustainability software that can provide you with guided assistance throughout?

What are your organization's impacts? Based on a materiality assessment, what Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are important for you to measure and track?

How complex is your business? How big is your organization, how complex are your current data reporting processes, and how much data do you have? Are you able to comfortably enter all sustainability data manually into a system, or do you have too many data owners reporting on a variety of data categories, making it difficult to juggle manually?

What are your ambitions? What are you hoping to achieve? Are you looking to just stay compliant with the relevant regulations, do you want to make sure you are on par with your industry peers in terms of sustainability performance, or do you want to outperform competitors and become a known leader in sustainability?

Your ambitions could make the difference between going for a simple questionnaire-based software that offers simple data management with manual data entry, asking you to fill in fields like ‘How much electricity did you use last year?’, or a future-proof software that helps you analyze and visualize your raw data, and makes your data do the work for you with smart technology.

2. Is it simple and flexible?

Introducing the help of a sustainability software should take a huge load off of sustainability management, rather than give you more technology-induced stress. Even if the software offers you several amazing features, it won’t matter if it is tricky to set up, understand and use. In that case, you might just end up spending more time trying to incorporate the use of the software that is supposed to help you save time, costs and resources – the irony!

It also helps if the software is flexible and adaptable to your organization and its changing needs.

The following questions might be helpful in this regard:

• Is the sustainability software easy to set up, with minimal steps to get started?

• Is it user-friendly and intuitive, with built-in guidance as needed?

• How ‘self-service’ is the software? Are you able to independently add or adjust your KPIs, add new data categories to track, and make other types of customizations, all without involving the help of external consultants?

The more flexible the software is, and the easier it is to understand and grasp, the quicker your colleagues will be able to use it effectively, and the quicker you will be able to seamlessly incorporate the sustainability software into your sustainability management processes and your organization.

3. Does the software save you time and resources?

A good sustainability software should help you, your team, and your entire organization drastically reduce the time and resources spent on data handling, data management, as well as team management – otherwise, what's the point!

One key feature in most sustainability softwares is the ability to coordinate work with your colleagues within the same platform.

You might also want to find out:

• Does the platform allow you to distribute tasks, send automated reminders, and create built-in notifications and workflows?

These features could save you the hassle of having to manually manage your colleagues, data owners, and data processes, by, for example, making sure that data input deadlines are not missed, that data points are not missing, and that the people responsible for missing information can be easily reminded and notified. Also,

• How easy is it for data owners to input their data?

Do they have to manually type in their numbers, or are they able to simply upload data files in any format, and let automation do the magic? Does it already have built-in and customizable rules that will help with data calculations, such as having pre-set greenhouse gas emissions calculations?

4. Does it increase the quality, transparency, and traceability of your data?

A major blocker in traditional sustainability management is data-handling. Yet, transformative change can only come from actionable insights, which come from accurate, timely, and high-quality data.

This brings us to yet another important consideration when it comes to choosing a sustainability software: Does the sustainability software increase the quality of your data?

• Does the sustainability software conform to international sustainability frameworks, guidelines and standards, such as GRI or the SDGs?

• Does it allow you to cross-check against your preferred frameworks and make sure you are compliant?

• Does the software come with automatic quality controls which will alert you of missing or incorrect data, and prevent users from moving on with tasks if necessary data points are missing, or if there seem to be anomalies in the data?

• Does the software allow data reporters to easily make updates or corrections as needed?

In the same vein, another important consideration is also whether the software increases transparency and traceability of your data, which is vital for sustainability reporting and auditing.

• Does the system allow data to be easily corrected or updated, while keeping the original data files intact for traceability purposes?

• Does the platform have features that will support transparency and auditing, such as being able to view audit trails?

5. What are the (hidden) costs?

It’s good to be aware of any potential additional costs, if any, that might be required of you at some point, on top of the base price of the subscription. The following questions might help:

• Are there any initial implementation costs, such as hiring a consultant to set up? Or will you be able to do that independently with adequate instructions?

• Will there be additional costs for customizing or re-configuring the solution, when the needs of your organization change?

• Does the subscription come with regular technology updates and rollouts? Will they be complimentary or will you have to pay for them?

6. Does it help you accelerate change?

Ultimately, you want your sustainability software to make the data work for you – apart from helping you tackle the tedious task of data collection and processing (and reducing human-error in the process), the sustainability software you choose should be able to give you more time to monitor and track your sustainability data more often, and also provide you with the tools to understand, analyse and make use of your data insights.

• Does the sustainability software allow you to update data in real time to follow up on progress?

• Does it allow you to visualize your data with customizable dashboards in a way that will help you facilitate decision-making?

• Does it allow you to model different scenarios?

• Does it allow you to benchmark yourself against peers and industry standards?

• Does it provide you with frequent, actionable insights and decision material?

• Does it provide you with recommendations on where and how to improve, how to perform well in your KPIs, and ultimately accelerate change?

With these 30 questions in mind...

You’re now better equipped to choose a sustainability software that best suits your business! Investing in the right sustainability software should improve your overall experience in collecting, understanding, and presenting quality sustainability data, with the help of more efficient workflows enabled by smart technology.

SustainLab is a SaaS sustainability management software that automates collection, processing, and visualization of sustainability data. Our mission is to enable decision-makers to frequently and consistently track all of their impacts, so they can achieve impactful sustainability results. We want to make it easy for you to factor sustainability into your everyday business decisions .

Psst, we also tick a lot of the boxes above! Curious to know about what we have to offer? Contact us for a free demo today!

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