Here's a situation a lot of small and mid-sized companies now find themselves in: they're not remotely close to CSRD's scope thresholds, and yet a large customer somewhere up the value chain keeps asking detailed sustainability questions anyway, because that customer needs the data for its own Scope 3 reporting. VSME (the Voluntary Sustainability Reporting Standard for non-listed SMEs) exists to give those companies a proportionate way to respond.

Who It's Actually For

VSME was developed by EFRAG specifically for SMEs that sit outside CSRD's direct scope. It skips the complexity of full ESRS reporting while still producing information that's genuinely useful to whoever's asking for it, which is a fairly narrow needle to thread and one EFRAG seems to have threaded reasonably well.

The Value Chain Cap: Arguably the Most Important Feature

Here's the detail that matters most in practice: under CSRD, large companies are barred from requesting sustainability data from their SME suppliers beyond what VSME actually requires. This "value chain cap" protects smaller suppliers from being buried under disproportionate data requests from every large customer they have, while still guaranteeing those large companies get what they need for their own compliance. It's a genuinely elegant compromise, and one that a lot of SMEs don't realize exists until they need to push back on an over-eager procurement request.

The Tools EFRAG Provides

EFRAG offers an Excel-based VSME Digital Template alongside an XBRL converter that turns the completed template into machine-readable XBRL format. In other words, an SME with no dedicated sustainability software can still produce a report that plugs into the systems larger companies expect.

What SMEs Actually Get Out of It

• A simplified reporting path compared to full ESRS
• Better standing when applying for green financing
• A ready answer when supply chain data requests come in
• Meaningfully less administrative burden than the alternative

At BUME, VSME reporting sits inside the same platform we use for broader value chain data collection, so an SME supplying a large CSRD-scoped customer isn't left managing a separate tool just to answer one set of questions.