Your customer asked for your emissions: what to do

A bigger customer sends an email, or slips a line into a contract renewal, or attaches a "supplier sustainability questionnaire." Somewhere in it: "Please provide your greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions."

If your first reaction was a small jolt of panic — you run a trades firm, a café, an agency, a workshop, not an environmental department — you're exactly who this guide is for. Take a breath. This is more normal than it feels, and the honest version is far simpler than it looks.

Why is this suddenly happening?

You didn't do anything wrong, and a new law didn't just land on your desk. What's happening is that bigger companies are now under real pressure to report their own emissions — and a large share of any company's emissions come from its suppliers. So to satisfy their own obligations, they're asking suppliers like you for the numbers.

Rules such as California's climate-disclosure law (SB 253), the EU's reporting and carbon-border measures, and tightening requirements in the UK and Australia all push large organisations to account for emissions right across their supply chains. You're not the target of those rules. You're the data they need to meet them. That's why the request lands on small businesses that have never thought about carbon before.

The upside is worth sitting with. Businesses that can answer this question quickly and credibly become the easy supplier to keep. The ones who can't are the ones who get nervous emails at renewal time.

What are they actually asking for?

Almost always, the starting point is two numbers, grouped into what the industry calls "scopes":

Scope 1 · Direct

What you control

Emissions from sources you directly control — fuel burned on-site or in vehicles you own.

Natural gas in a furnace or boiler
Petrol or diesel in your vehicles
Propane for heating or equipment
Refrigerant leaks from cooling systems

Scope 2 · Purchased energy

The energy you buy

Emissions created elsewhere to generate the electricity you use — produced at the power station, not on your premises.

Electricity through your meter
Workshop, shop, or office power
Purchased heat or steam, where it applies
Varies a lot by region

Added together, these are usually expressed as a single figure in tonnes of CO₂-equivalent (tCO₂e) — one tidy number that rolls carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into a common unit. That number, with a short note on how you arrived at it, is what most first requests are really after.

What you can stop worrying about

A few things people assume they need, and usually don't — at least not yet:

You probably don't need Scope 3 right now. Scope 3 is everything further up and down your chain — your suppliers' suppliers, how customers use what you sell, and so on. It's large and genuinely hard, and most first-time requests to a small supplier are satisfied with Scope 1 and 2. If your customer specifically asks for Scope 3, that's a different conversation — but don't volunteer to boil the ocean.
You don't need a five-figure consultant to produce a first credible number. Consultants earn their keep on complex or formally audited reporting. A single-location small business answering a supplier questionnaire is not that.
You don't need enterprise software built for companies fifty times your size. Most of it will overwhelm you — and bill you accordingly.

How to produce a credible number, in plain steps

Gather a little data. Twelve months is ideal. You're mostly looking for: your electricity use (the kWh on your bills), any fuel you burn on-site or in vehicles you own (natural gas, propane, diesel, petrol), and — if relevant — any refrigerant top-ups.
Apply the right local emission factors. This is the step that makes a number credible. An "emission factor" converts your activity — say, kWh of electricity — into emissions, and it varies enormously by where you are, because a grid running on hydro is a world apart from one running on coal. Use your country and region's official factors (Canada's national inventory, the US EPA's grid data, the UK's DEFRA factors, Australia's NGER), not a generic global average.
Add it up and write down your method. Your total in tCO₂e, plus a short, honest note on what you included, what you left out (for example, "Scope 1 and 2; Scope 3 not yet covered"), and where your factors came from.

That last part — writing down your method — is what separates a number people trust from a number people question.

What actually makes a number "credible"?

Here's the quiet truth of emissions reporting: anyone can produce a number. The real question your customer — or their auditor — has is can I trust how you got it? A credible answer:

uses official, regional emission factors, and says which ones;
is honest about its boundaries — what's in, what's out;
and can be explained — if someone asks "how did you calculate this?", you have an answer.

A number that hides its method behind a black box is the one that gets challenged. A number whose method you can point to — even a simple one — is the one that gets accepted.

Where ScopeSimple fits

This is exactly the job ScopeSimple was built for. You enter the handful of numbers above; it applies your region's official emission factors automatically; and it produces a clean Scope 1 + 2 report with the methodology written right into it — so it stands up to the question "how did you work this out?" An afternoon, not an invoice.

It's deliberately built for individuals and small businesses — not enterprise, not Scope 3, not multi-site — and it's honest about precisely that. The whole point is to get you from "a customer asked for our emissions and I have no idea where to start" to "here's our report," without the cost or the overwhelm.

Your customer asked for your emissions. Now what?