FAQ
Frequently asked questions about the score4more platform
You use the score4more platform and services to register and create an account. As with other online platforms, the legal basis is regulated by score4more’s General Terms and Conditions and Privacy Policy, e.g. the technical availability of the services or due diligence and data protection issues.
Problems with registration: The error message “Company already exists” indicates that another employee of your company has already created a profile for your company. Each user can currently be assigned to exactly one company profile. Use a different e-mail address to create another profile, e.g. for an independent sub-company. Problems logging in: If you have forgotten your password, you can have a new password sent to you in the login area under “Forgot password”. If you have any further questions, please contact our support team via the chat function or hello@score4more.eu.
Yes, you can work together as a team and invite four other users to join your team by email, who can then edit the sustainability profile together.
Especially in larger companies, contact persons, roles and responsibilities can change frequently. If the editing user for score4more and the profile has changed at your company, it is technically possible to implement this change using the team function. The original user sets up the team function and invites the transferring user as a team member by e-mail. The new user can then continue to edit the profile as normal.
Yes, you can also create an account on score4more and a sustainability profile on behalf of a company. To do this, enter the contact persons in the company on whose behalf you are working under Contact details in the profile. You can then invite your contacts to the profile. Up to 5 team members can be setup via the team function.
The basic account includes free basic functionalities such as the sustainability profile, which enable simple and free participation in the German Sustainability Award. In the Pro account, you can use paid additional functionalities such as the long profile, scoring, benchmarking and layouted PDF downloads. These are intended to provide assistance in the transformation process and facilitate teamwork. You can find out more about the differences between Basic and Pro on our website.
The current pricing is published on the website in the pricing section. The aim is to give small and medium-sized companies or organizations with a limited budget access to sustainability data and scoring and benchmarking analyses so that they can make informed and targeted decisions.
score4more is constantly evolving as a platform to provide a wider range of analyses and applications. By taking out an annual subscription to score4more Pro, you can use future Pro functions directly as part of your subscription.
Yes, your customer can simply invite you by email as an external team member via “Teams” from their account. Similarly, you can invite your customer via the team function.
Payment is made via Stripe as the payment service provider by credit card using the annual payment method. You also enter your billing details in the payment process via Stripe. You will receive a payment receipt and an invoice by e-mail immediately after completion.
Especially in larger companies, payment options are often restricted for suppliers, e.g. via settings in ERP systems. For simple processing in purchasing, you should therefore classify score4more internally as a software provider, as credit card payment is generally possible in purchasing for software providers and SaaS solutions.
You can manage and change all subscription and billing data in Stripe, including canceling your annual subscription. To do this, go to your score4more account with Stripe using the user email for the account.
If you wish to carry out deletions (e.g. deleting team members, changing the admin user in the team), this may not always be possible via the platform, as the respective functionality is still under development. In this case, please contact our support team via the chat function or hello@score4more.eu.
If you wish to delete your score4more account, please send an informal email to hello@score4more.eu stating the company name and the email address with which the account was created. We will verify your request and confirm the deletion once it has been completed. After an account deletion, all data including the sustainability profile and possible scoring and benchmarking results will be deleted.
The company profile presents industry-specific actions, solutions and key performance indicators for the company in a structured manner. It summarizes the contents of the sustainability report or the published sustainability performance of the company in a simple way. The profile is based on the European Reporting Standards (ESRS) and the Voluntary SME (VSME) standard. The profile consists of overarching topics summarizing busines, sustainability and management essentials as well as industry-specific ESG topics. The topics are filtered by industry materiality based on a double materiality analysis for the industry.
The short profile is the basis version of the company profile included in the basic account for free. It comprises business and sustainability overarching topics and the top 4 most important ESG topics per industry. It is the basis e.g. for participating in awards. The long profile is included in addition in the Pro account. It supports more in-depth analysis e.g. in company supply chains, by investors or banks. It includes in addition management pratices and the top 5-11 most material industry topics. Both profile versions can be online dynamically selected via a selection menu.
If your company profile is prefilled and presearched by score4more, editing and correcting it may take 30 to 60 minutes for short vs. long version. In case you create your profile completely new, the net editing time can take up to 2 hours. score4more runs AI models that can fill profiles based on existing sources. If you want to use this service contact us under hello@score4more.eu. If required, you can also use the team function to edit and coordinate the profile together as a team.
Material sustainability topics vary from industry to industry. In the health industry, for example, social sustainability aspects are material, while in energy-intensive industries, climate and energy issues are important. These industry specifics are mapped via your profile. It is a pre-selection of topic oriented at a double materiality analysis of topics for the industry. The profile therefore also provides companies with starting points for so-called IRO topics (Impact, Risks, Opportunities), which are analyzed in materiality analyses in accordance with the EU ESRS reporting standard.
You select the industry in which your company is predominantly active, i.e. where the majority of sales or value creation is generated. You can find a more detailed description of industries here. You can also change the industry later in the master data of the profile.
If your company has independent sub-companies that are active in different industries, a sub-company can also create its own profile in a different industry. The prerequisite is that there is a delimitable sub-company legal entity and that the sustainability performance of the sub-company is published independently, e.g. via its own sustainability report. The profile for the sub-company is created by a separate user and by specifying the sub-company’s own company name
To change your company to a different industry, you can change the industry in the company details of your profile.
score4more wants to make the database from sustainability reports and published information more usable. This information is validated internally and increasingly also externally by auditors and has an official character. The quality and importance of data from sustainability reports will continue to increase with the EU regulation on more extensive reporting requirements (CSRD/ESRS/VSME).
Many companies do not yet have a sustainability report yet. Companies without a report can still create a profile and alternatively provide a link to the best possible published source(s) in which the information provided in the profile can be found. These can be, for example, a sustainability publication or descriptions on the company website.
Your profile is currently not public and other companies cannot see the profile in detail. In future, selected data such as the company name, industry, location or abstract can be activated for search functions. Companies will also be able to set the visibility of their profile themselves. As the profiles are based on public data and transparency and best practice transfer is an important lever in the transformation, the aim is to make public sustainability data easier and more structured to use for the transformation. The already available benchmarking is a first step here: in benchmarking, scorings as well as selected and summarized best practices of pre-selected pioneers are aggregated and compared with your profile. The content of the pioneering companies in each industry is thus used for benchmarks (selection via the current scores), with the measures and solutions being filtered for relevance with the help of AI and compiled in a different language. You can therefore be sure that you have control over the original content of your profile.
Do you already have a sustainability report or an integrated report? Then this is your source. Enter the URL link to your current report here, as well as the year to which the information in the report refers. If you do not yet have a report, enter an alternative URL link to published sustainability information, for example more detailed descriptions on your website. In this case, select the current year as a reference year linked to current website information.
You can provide up to three sources as the basis for your profile. It is important that these sources are publicly accessible, as only information that has already been published can be taken into account. This makes sense, for example, if there is another relevant source in addition to the sustainability report as the main source, such as a sustainability section on the website or a progress report.
Yes, please update your profile as soon as the sources you have stored are also updated, e.g. when your new sustainability report is published or website content has changed. The profile should always summarize the content of the current sources stored.
Previous versions of the profile are saved in the background as a technical backup. As a user, you will be able to view the profile versions from previous years in future. These will be saved for the respective year on December 31st and will be made available to the user as a separate annual version.
You can update the URL link to your (publicly available) source(s) “Compavia ny details”. To do this, click on Edit in your company details and save the changes. You can also change the company name there.
Please only mention published actions and solutions. This creates the same data basis and conditions for all companies. In particular, please refrain from listing confidential information in your score4more profile.
The profile is aligned with EU ESRS and VSME reorting topics. This makes it easier to allocate your content to the right topic. You can also use the help text to check, which content belongs to which questions. The most common problems in allocation occur with resource topics such as recycling actions, which are often listed under climate protection instead of circular economy. Further information about profile topics can be found in the methodology.
In the profile, greenhouse gas emissions of the companies of the last 3 years are queried as key figures for Scope 1, 2 and 3. If you have not yet measured certain years and/or scopes, this can be shown accordingly in the balance sheet. You can still complete your profile, have it scored or submit it later.
In the profile, several indicators are offered, which are aligend with the EU VSME comprehensive standard. You can easily first indicate with a simple Yes/No-question, if you use an indicator or not. Only in case of Yes, the indicator table is shown and can be edited. If you don’t have indicator values, it is not a general problem. Note, that companies with complete indicator reporting and performance tracking are recognized with better scores over companies without an indicator reporting and performance transparency.
You are welcome to use our score4more Customer Support Chat and/or book a free 15-minute onboarding session. Our sustainability and development team will support you quickly and competently.
Your profile is currently not directly visible, i.e. if you want to make your profile accessible to other people or organizations, you can simply invite them as a team member using the “Teams” menu item. To do this, enter the e-mail address of the desired contact, who will then receive an invitation. Another alternative is to use the PDF funtion in your Pro account to generate a layouted PDF version of your profile, which can be downloaded and shared within the company.
You can have your company profile scored directly online on a 6-level scale to identify strengths and potential for improvement in your sustainability performance. The scoring is created for each topic in the profile and on average. With the scoring you are also directly benchmarkable and can compare your scoring in benchmarking with other pioneering companies in order to identify best practice measures and solutions for score improvement.
Companies still receive too little structured feedback on their sustainability performance. For example, companies sometimes publish sustainability reports over several years without ever knowing exactly how well they are performing due to a lack of feedback or systematic evaluation methods. Until now, only large companies have been able to use ratings, but these are often expensive and extensive. With scoring, we want to give all companies the opportunity to receive a structured and comparable feedback for their sustainability performance in specific areas and to be able to compare themselves with others. This can provide clarity as to where a company stands in the transformation process. It can facilitate communication within the company and especially with the management as to where priorities and new sustainability initiatives should be set. We have observed that companies with scoring over several years can develop in a much more targeted manner and demonstrably improve and transform faster.
You can use the scoring for your company profile as a paid Pro functionality. If you have upgraded to Pro, you can request the scoring in your profile. This is then created on the basis of the existing profile and then displayed online in the company profile. The creation of the scoring is currently still partially automated and takes up to 10 working days. You will be informed by e-mail when the scoring is available in the profile.
As part of the Pro annual subscription, you can be scored twice a year. It would be conceivable, for example, to have a scoring carried out at the beginning of the year for a company profile based on the previous year’s performance in order to identify areas for improvement. After implementing new actions, you can have the profile updated accordingly in the second half of the year in order to determine progress.
The benchmarking is a key function in the score4more Pro package. The benchmarking allows you to compare your company with pioneering companies from your industry in terms of scoring and best practices in each individual topic of the company profile. The goal is to accelerate the transformation: Via best practice transfer and learning from the best, all companies should have the opportunity to quickly and easily identify additional actions and steps in the transformation towards sustainability for their own improvement. Benchmarking offers a pragmatic and clear starting point here.
In order to participate in the benchmarking, you complete your own company profile and request a scoring within your Pro account. Once you have your scoring, you can request the benchmarking in the next step.
Yes, experience shows that benchmarking provides valuable orientation, especially for companies that are supposedly still at the beginning. Companies discover that they may not be as lagging as they always thought and have already implemented a number of actions. And the pioneering examples usually provide direct starting points for launching their own more comprehensive sustainability program.
The selected pioneering companies are predefined and represent pioneers in an industry on the basis of leading scoring results.
Once the scoring is available, you can simply request the benchmarking online. The creation takes up to 10 working days with partial automation. As soon as the benchmarking is available, you will be informed by e-mail. You can then use the benchmarking directly online.
No, the best practices in the benchmarking are a selection and summary of leading actions by the companies. They are filtered from the profiles of the pioneering companies according to their degree of sustainability (based on the scores) and summarized linguistically using AI/ML so that they have a consistent length and form of wording. As all the information in the profiles comes from published sources, the best practices can also be found in public sources.
Yes, as part of your Pro account, you can generate a layouted benchmarking report as PDF from the online results, which can be downloaded and used as management report internally.
A solution profile is a compilation of information about your leading sustainability solutions, i.e. product, service or system. The solution profile comprises among others the description of the sustainability problem, the solution approach and the impact achieved. It is complemented by optional materials like photos and videos, the solution website, and impact assessment and further documents. You can create and manage solution profiles from your existing score4more account.
The solution profile is intended to summarize sustainable products and services in a comprehensible way and make them visible to other companies on the platform. Solution profiles are always assigned to a company profile. Ultimate goal is to make the best sustainable solutions visible and promote their implementation for faster transformation, whether through ecosystems like the DNP or by addressing specific target industries and customer companies.
The solution profile includes a title, an image, the summary (abstract) and the selection of the relevant transformation fields as central components. You can define up to three transformation fields.
Besides further information are added consisting of solution details, impact, objectives, narrative as well as additional optional resources and contact details for the solution.
The aim of the solution profiles is to make sustainable products and services more visible. This can be achieved through participation in ecosystems such as awards or, in the long term, through the targeted display of the profiles to potential matching customer companies.
Yes, solutions are all market-oriented offerings, i.e. products, services and solution systems.
Yes, you can also create solution profiles for solutions solving a sustainability problem. Import is that the solution is made available to customers for implementation creating a positive sustainability impact at the customer.
Recommended is to create up to 3 solution profiles focussing on the high impact flagship solutions of your company. Technically, you can also create more solutions. Note that some ecosystems where you can submit your solution profiles have a limitation on solutions submitted. This means that you can technically create more than 3 solutions and then you can select, which solutions you want to submit to the ecosystem.
Customers and ecosystems analyze solution sustainability together with the respective company sustainability as a supplier. That’s why a company profile is linked to the solution profile showing the sustainability of the company. Still the depth of company information analyzed depends on the ecosystems and customers.
Transformation fields are derived from the United Nations 2030 Agenda, the objectives of the EU Green Deal along the CSRD/ESRS/VSME and the German government’s sustainability strategy. They form the categories for the solution profiles on score4more and are determined independently of the industry to which the companies belong. The transformation fields are (with reference to related ESRS topics):
– Climate (in particular climate protection and climate adaptation; E1),
– Resources (esp. circular economy and water; E5/E3),
– Nature (esp. pollutants and biodiversity; E2/E4),
– Work (esp. employees and suppliers; S1/S2) and
– Society (esp. communities and end-consumers; S3/S4)
In the solution profile, you select the field(s), where your solution as main sustainability impact.
You can upload up to 2 links (to the solution website and another source) and 2 files (PDF, PNG or JPEG).
Your solution profile is currently being made visible at your request for ecosystems such as awards. In future, you will also be able to draw companies’ attention to your solutions.
Yes, creating a solution profile is free of charge. However, participation in ecosystems, such as awards, may incur costs defined by the ecosystem.
You can delete a solution profile at the three dots menu in the solution title bar. Note that if the solution is still used in ecosystems, you also delete your solution in these ecosystems.