What is cdp response preparation?
The supply-chain questionnaire your enterprise customer sent, answered properly — data gathered, methodology documented, submission-ready.
A CDP request almost never starts with the company that receives it. It starts with one of that company's large customers — a retailer, an OEM, a bank — that is itself a CDP discloser and runs a Supply Chain program to pull emissions data out of its supplier base for its own Scope 3 reporting. CDP then emails the supplier an invitation tied to that customer's member account, with a response window the customer sets, not CDP's public disclosure calendar. For a supplier who has never touched a sustainability questionnaire before, the email itself is often the first sign this is now part of doing business with that account.
Company size decides which questionnaire lands: the streamlined SME questionnaire is available to organizations with 1,000 or fewer employees and annual revenue at or below US$250 million, and it now goes further than climate alone — the 2026 version adds forest and water-security modules a company can opt into at questionnaire setup. Anyone larger fills out the full corporate questionnaire, which runs materially longer and asks for board-level governance detail, scenario analysis and target-setting a small supplier team usually hasn't built yet. Getting the right questionnaire assigned, and understanding which sections are conditional on the requesting member's specific ask, is the first place a first-time responder loses time.
Who does what
| Your CapEasy team | CDP response preparation, the reconciliations and reporting behind it, and the questions list that keeps it honest. |
| Your CPA or enrolled agent | Everything that carries a licence in United States — rendered exactly as written: issue compilation, review or audit reports — those are restricted to licensed cpa firms. |
| You | One conversation with one named person, and the decisions that are genuinely yours. |
CDP response preparation in United States
The SME questionnaire has real eligibility limits, and picking the wrong one wastes the response
CDP's SME questionnaire is available to companies with 1,000 or fewer employees and annual revenue of US$250 million or less; above either threshold, CDP routes the company to the full corporate questionnaire, which asks for board-oversight narrative, scenario analysis and target detail the streamlined track never touches. Some sections of even the SME track only appear because a specific requesting member asked for them — the questionnaire a supplier sees is shaped by who invited them, not a fixed template. We confirm eligibility and map the actual question set assigned to your invitation before drafting starts, so effort doesn't go into sections that were never going to be scored.
Scoring runs in gated bands — disclosure, awareness, management, leadership — and a company can't skip ahead
CDP evaluates a response level by level: it has to clear the disclosure band cleanly before the awareness-level questions are assessed, and so on up through management to leadership. On the SME scale the result lands somewhere from SME D to SME A; 2026 is the first cycle an SME can reach SME A on climate change, where the ceiling used to sit at SME B. A response with strong leadership-level narrative but gaps in the basic disclosure data still scores low overall, because the gate below it wasn't cleared — which is why we work the response bottom-up, closing disclosure-level gaps before polishing the sections that read best.
Two deadlines exist in every cycle, and only the earlier one keeps the response scored
CDP's own 2026 disclosure calendar sets a scoring deadline in mid-September, after which a submitted response is eligible for that cycle's score, and a separate final close about six weeks later, after which the questionnaire locks entirely. A response submitted in that gap between the two is still accepted and visible to the requesting customer, but it will not carry a score for the cycle — and a customer that gates suppliers on score, not just submission, treats that the same as a late response. We track the scoring deadline, not the close date, as the real target.
Leadership-band scores require third-party verified emissions data, which a supplier team can't generate internally
CDP's own verification essential criteria — which apply to the full corporate questionnaire, not the SME track — set Leadership at third-party verification of at least 95% of Scope 1 and 2 emissions plus at least one verified Scope 3 category, rising to full (100%) Scope 1 and 2 coverage plus at least 70% of Scope 3 emissions verified for A List consideration. Verification is performed by an accredited external provider against a recognized standard, not something the responding company self-certifies. Most first-time SME suppliers aren't chasing A List status, and the SME track itself doesn't carry a mandatory verification requirement; we flag verification as a later-stage option only when a company's own customer relationship or growth plans make it worth pursuing, and we don't build a response around a verified-emissions claim that isn't actually backed by a verifier's sign-off.
What your CPA or enrolled agent receives from us
- The completed CDP questionnaire draft, section by section, matched exactly to the question set your requesting customer's invitation assigned — ready for your account holder to review inside CDP's portal.
- Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions calculations with the GHG Protocol method used for each source shown, and the underlying activity data (utility bills, fuel records, mileage logs) attached as evidence for every figure.
- A Scope 3 estimate for whichever categories your requesting customer's question set actually asks for, built from spend data or supplier-specific records where you have them, with the calculation approach documented category by category.
- A governance and risk-management narrative section — who at the company oversees climate-related decisions, how climate risk gets identified — written from the structure you actually have, not a template answer.
- A gap list: sections of the questionnaire your current data can't fully support yet, so nothing gets submitted with a stronger claim than the evidence backs.
- A response-readiness note on the scoring bands — where the draft is likely to land on disclosure versus management-level questions — so your account holder knows what they're submitting before they submit it.
