Every CSRD report starts in the same place, and it isn't the emissions spreadsheet. It's the double materiality assessment. This is the exercise that decides which sustainability topics your company actually has to report on, which makes it worth getting right the first time rather than rushing through it.

The Process, Roughly

Start with your stakeholders. Before you can assess anything, you need to know who's affected by, or interested in, your sustainability performance: investors, employees, the communities you operate in, regulators, customers, and NGOs. This list shapes everything that follows.

Map the value chain. Where in your operations (upstream, in-house, or downstream) could impacts, risks, or opportunities actually arise? You can't assess what you haven't mapped.

Identify the IROs. For each sustainability topic on the table (climate, pollution, water, workforce conditions, and so on), work out what the actual and potential impacts, risks, and opportunities look like.

Assess severity and likelihood. On the impact side, that means scale, scope, and whether the effect is reversible. On the financial side, it means sizing up the magnitude of potential financial consequences.

Set your threshold. Decide where the cutoff sits. Anything scoring above it becomes a disclosure obligation under the relevant ESRS standard.

Don't Skip the Paper Trail

None of this counts for much if it isn't documented. Every assumption, every methodology choice, every stakeholder conversation, and every justification for where you set the threshold: all of it becomes evidence an auditor will eventually want to see. Companies that treat this as a light internal exercise tend to regret it when assurance season arrives.

We built BUME's workflow around exactly this pain point. It provides structured steps for each stage above, with the audit trail and evidence capture happening automatically as you go, rather than reconstructed after the fact.