Insights
Ask three providers what a double materiality assessment costs and you will get three very different numbers, sometimes an order of magnitude apart. That is not because someone is overcharging. It is because the phrase covers everything from a half day workshop that produces a matrix to a rigorous, documented, assurance ready assessment. The two are not the same product, and the price gap reflects that.
By Christopher Fagan
Rather than quote a figure that would be meaningless without your context, here is what actually drives the cost, so you can read a quote properly.
The single biggest driver. A UK services business with a short supplier list is a fraction of the work of a manufacturer with a deep, international supply chain. Most of the effort in a serious assessment goes into the value chain, so its complexity dominates the cost.
A defensible assessment engages affected stakeholders and users of financial statements, as distinct groups, through interviews and structured input. That takes time. A cheap assessment substitutes the project team’s assumptions for actual engagement, which is quicker and does not survive scrutiny.
If the output has to withstand assurance, the reasoning behind every scoring decision has to be captured. That documentation is a meaningful share of the effort and it is exactly what gets cut to hit a low price.
An organisation that already understands its sustainability topics and has some data is cheaper to assess than one starting cold.
A workshop style assessment produces something that looks like a deliverable, a scored matrix, a short report. The problem appears at assurance, or when the business changes and the reasoning was never written down. At that point it has to be redone, and you pay twice. The genuinely cheap option is a well built assessment that lasts several reporting cycles.
Budget for an assessment you will only do once for several years, not one you redo annually. Weighed against the downstream data and reporting cost it sets in motion, and against the risk of a failed assurance, getting it right the first time is comfortably the cheaper path.
We scope assessments to your actual value chain and tell you honestly what drives the number. See our double materiality assessment service or get in touch.
If any of this is live for you right now, the senior people who wrote it are the people you would work with.