ESG gap analysis: frequently asked questions

An ESG gap analysis is a structured review that compares what a company has actually disclosed in its sustainability report against what a reporting framework requires, and lists every requirement the report fails to meet. The output is a gap register: requirement by requirement, what is covered, what is partially covered, and what is missing entirely.

It is the standard preparation step before a CSRD or ISSB reporting cycle and before external assurance, because it tells a reporting team what to fix while there is still time to fix it.

Scopesource is ESG gap analysis software. You upload a corporate sustainability or ESG report as a PDF, and it cross-examines that document against 29 global reporting frameworks, returning every disclosure gap with a verbatim quote from the report and the page number it came from.

A review that takes an analyst days of manual reading returns in minutes, and every finding is traceable back to the source page, so a client or an assurer can check it.

Scopesource ships requirement content for 29 frameworks. You choose which ones to run a report against, and can run several in a single analysis:

EU and UK regulation

CSRD via ESRS Set 1, EU Taxonomy, CSDDD, UK SECR, UK climate-related financial disclosure (Companies Act 2006 s414CB), UK SDR (asset manager scope), and UK PPN 06/21 carbon reduction plans.

Global standards

ISSB IFRS S1 and IFRS S2, TCFD, and TNFD v1.0.

GRI

GRI 1 Foundation, GRI 2 General Disclosures, GRI 3 Material Topics, GRI 302 Energy, GRI 305 Emissions, GRI 306 Waste, GRI 401 Employment, and GRI 403 Occupational Health and Safety.

Carbon accounting

GHG Protocol Corporate Standard and the GHG Protocol Corporate Value Chain (Scope 3) Standard.

Voluntary disclosure and targets

CDP Climate Change 2024, SBTi Corporate Criteria, UN SDG corporate alignment, and a UN Global Compact + ILO supply chain baseline.

Ratings and certification readiness

EcoVadis and B Corp readiness checks, ASI Performance Standard V3, and Green Button 2.0. These are readiness assessments against published criteria, not the certifications themselves.

Four steps, from PDF to a page-cited Word report:

1. Upload — drop in a sustainability or ESG report as a PDF, or point Scopesource at the URL it is published on.
2. Select frameworks — pick the standards the report needs to satisfy, such as ESRS, IFRS S2 and GRI together.
3. Analyse — the AI reads the text, tables, charts and footnotes, then matches what it finds against each individual framework requirement.
4. Export — download a DOCX report with an executive summary, the full gap table, and an evidence appendix.

Every requirement is graded on a five-state scale — fully addressed, substantially addressed, partially addressed, minimally addressed, or not addressed — with each gap ranked critical, high, medium or low by severity.

Minutes. A typical sustainability report is processed and returned as a completed gap analysis in the time it takes to make a coffee, against the days of reading the same review takes by hand.

Longer reports and multi-framework runs take proportionally longer, because every framework requirement is checked against the document separately rather than in one pass.

A professional DOCX report you can hand to a client or a board without rewriting it. It contains:

• An executive summary of where the report stands against each selected framework.
• A full gap table — every requirement, its status, and its severity.
• The evidence behind each finding: a verbatim quote from the report and the page number it appears on.
• Recommended actions for each gap, with the business risk of leaving it open.

The Practice and Firm plans can export the same report white-labelled with your own firm’s branding.

ESG ratings score a company; Scopesource audits a document. A rating tells you a company scored 62 out of 100 and rarely tells you why. A gap analysis tells you that ESRS E1-6 requires a Scope 3 breakdown by category, that the report on page 47 gives only a total, and that this is a high-severity gap.

Against manual review, the difference is traceability and coverage. A manual review produces notes in a spreadsheet that rarely link back to a page. Scopesource cites every finding, checks every requirement of every selected framework rather than the ones a reviewer had time for, and reads charts and tables that text-only extraction tools skip.

Every finding is checkable in seconds, because every finding carries its evidence. Each one quotes the report verbatim and names the page, so you verify a result by opening the PDF at that page rather than by trusting the tool.

This is deliberate. Scopesource is built to be used on work that goes to clients, boards and assurers, where an unsourced claim is worthless. Where the analysis finds nothing to support a requirement, it says so rather than inferring an answer.

A single ESG gap analysis costs £95 on Scopesource, pay as you go, with no subscription required. Ongoing plans start at £349 per month.

Every plan includes the full forensic analysis — all frameworks, page-referenced evidence on every finding, and the DOCX export. Plans differ by volume and by delivery features, not by analysis quality.

Pay as you go — £95 per analysis

One gap analysis credit. No subscription; buy another when you need one.

Practice — £349 per month

10 analyses a month, white-label exports carrying your own branding, cross-framework consolidation, and email support. Built for independent consultants.

Firm — £1,200 per month

40 analyses a month and everything in Practice, for a team working from one login. Per-seat accounts are not available yet.

No. Pay as you go exists precisely so you can run one real report for £95 before committing to anything. There is no contract and no minimum term on it.

Most people run one analysis on a report they already know well, check the findings against the pages cited, and decide from there.

Scopesource reads the report the way an analyst does, then checks it the way an auditor does. AI extracts disclosures from the document — including the contents of tables, charts and footnotes, not only the body text — and each extracted disclosure is matched against individual framework requirements using both rule-based checks and semantic analysis.

Semantic matching matters because companies rarely use a framework’s wording. A report that discusses “value chain emissions” is answering a Scope 3 requirement even though it never writes “Scope 3”, and keyword extraction misses exactly this.

Yes. Sustainability reports put their most important numbers in charts and tables — emissions trends, intensity ratios, year-on-year comparisons — and tools that extract plain text only miss them, then report a gap that is not actually a gap.

Scopesource interprets these visually alongside the surrounding narrative, so a figure that appears only in a bar chart still counts as evidence.

Yes, and this is one of the more common ways reports fail assurance. A statement that a company “aims to reach net zero by 2040” is an ambition; a framework requirement asking for current-year Scope 1 emissions is not satisfied by it.

The analysis distinguishes stated goals from reported performance, and cross-references figures between sections to catch totals that do not reconcile with the numbers behind them.

Yes. After an analysis completes, an AI co-pilot grounded in that specific document answers questions about it inside the platform — what a metric covers, why a requirement was marked partially addressed, how two figures relate.

It answers from the analysed report rather than from general knowledge, so you can interrogate a finding without leaving the platform or reopening the PDF.

Framework content is versioned and dated, and every analysis records which version of each framework it was run against. A report checked against ESRS Set 1 (2023) says so on its face.

This matters for audit trails: when a standard is revised, you can tell whether a finding reflects the current requirement or the one in force when the analysis ran.

ESG and sustainability consultants

Cross-examine a client’s report in minutes instead of days, and deliver a cited gap register rather than an opinion. The most common use is scoping a new mandate or preparing a board briefing.

In-house sustainability teams

Run a draft report through before publication, while gaps are still cheap to close, rather than discovering them in assurance.

Assurance and audit teams

Establish where a report is thin before fieldwork, with page references to test against.

Investors and analysts

Check whether a company’s disclosures actually support its claims, and screen for reports where the narrative outruns the evidence.

Yes, on the Practice and Firm plans: the report you hand a client carries your firm’s branding rather than ours. A single report is delivered under Scopesource’s branding.

Yes, and it is the highest-value moment to do it. Uploading a draft before publication is what turns a gap analysis from a post-mortem into something you can still act on.

Yes. Documents you upload are yours, are stored against your account only, and are not published, shared with other customers, or added to any public dataset.

The public company data shown elsewhere on Scopesource is compiled strictly from published sources — company sustainability reports, CDP disclosures, regulatory filings and public certifications. Your uploads are not part of it. Our Data Policy sets out that separation in full.

Scopesource is a UK company operating under UK GDPR. Data is transmitted over encrypted connections, held on GDPR-compliant infrastructure, and retained only as long as it is needed.

You can request access to, correction of, or deletion of your data at any time, and the platform supports those requests directly. The Privacy Policy covers the legal basis and retention in detail.

There is no separate enterprise tier. SSO, audit logging, a service-level agreement and custom framework development are not offered today. Accounts sign in with an email address and password, or with Google.

For procurement or security review documentation, contact us and we will provide what your organisation needs.