The Buyer’s Checklist for Automated Sustainability Data: 10 Essential Features

Cut costs, boost accuracy, and stay audit-ready with your sustainability data

Looking for a way to reduce the cost of preparing sustainability data while improving its speed and accuracy? Do you want to automate data while remaining audit-ready? And do you need to make business decisions with sustainability data? This checklist is for you!

Based on years of experience, and growing from spreadsheets to an automated system, GLYNT.AI brought together the key features our customers require and prospective customers ask about. We also lean into the future, bringing forward data requirements for AI.

Use this 10-point checklist to speed your strategic evaluations of automated sustainability data services. The business value of sustainability data is rising fast, and our comprehensive view will keep you ahead of the curve.

A note on partial versus complete data systems: Partial data solutions only do some data or data from certain sources. They increase total costs by 20 – 30% as sustainability teams spend more time managing the vendors and have to do more complex data reviews. Get maximum savings with a complete, automated solution. See the impact of partial solutions on your costs with the GLYNT.AI Savings Calculator

The Buyer’s Checklist for Automated Sustainability Data

Required Feature

Business Value

1

Accurate Data
– Ask for reports
– Demand transparency

A must-have for credible and reliable decision making. Demonstrate accuracy to your stakeholders

2

Abundant Data
– Get more data out of the files you have
– Avoid integration delays; Get data that is ready for immediate use

Precise, granular data is needed to identify savings hotspots and to build the business case for investments. Bonus value: Abundant data is a must-have for enterprise AI

3

Audit-Ready Data
– Add to your audit-ready archive each month
– Get audit-ready reports; stop the endless audit emails

Save time and expense on audits with organized data, reports and evidence. Automated systems provide a complete suite of audit-ready reports and documentation.

4

AI-Ready Data
– AI is data hungry. It needs an abundance of data
– AI needs context. Integrate business metadata with sustainability data

AI is a top strategic initiative. Get sustainability data that is ready for AI to leverage these powerful tools and align with the strategic agenda

5

Finance-Grade Data
– Get sustainability data that is as rigorously prepared as financial data
– Tie sustainability data back to AP and ERP systems for efficient, reliable reporting

Use finance-grade sustainability data to make tradeoffs between cost and emissions, revenue and energy use and more. Don’t get pushed to the side by poor quality data.

6

Automated Service
– Look for a system that can expand with your needs and meeting increasing regulatory and security requirements: Global, scalable and compliant

Demand for data is skyrocketing. Efficiently manage your full sweep of data with a complete and automated data system.

7

Integration
– Use the business software you already have
– Demand friction-free data transfers
– Watch out for high maintenance costs

Drive business impact with sustainability data that flows into your existing business systems

8

No Developers Required
–Look for data solutions that are self-contained and ready to deploy
– Ask about deployment timelines
– Ask about how data quality is maintained

WIth tight budgets and a focus on AI, dev and IT teams are backed up. It is hard to accelerate data and change when it takes 9 months to start.

9

Customization
– Look for a built-in customization engine, one that will handle your varied reporting needs
– Look for the ability to add and modify fields, as data needs are changing rapidly in our AI-driven era

The modern standard is “write once, publish many”; it is the efficient way to meet the many varied requests for reports and data from a single source of truth.

10

Compliance (GRC)
– Look for solutions that are SOC 2 or SOC 1 compliant, to ensure that your data remains private and secure
– Look for AI that does not share your data with other customers or other vendors, specifically AI providers

If data is the new fuel and AI is the rocket ship, that fuel is valuable! Protect your data privacy and security with GRC compliance, including the emerging AI requirements.