Understanding supporting documents

Supporting documentation is a vital part of our assessment and is critical to ensure that your company has an accurate assessment of your sustainability practices and performance. You can validate the questionnaire without uploading any documents. However, please note that we can only credit answers backed by proper evidence.

The supporting documents are evidence of your answers and are critical for the reliability of your assessment. Please remember that your responses to the questionnaire can only be credited if the requested documentation backs them up.

The documents should demonstrate your company’s sustainability management system, be recent, relevant, complete and relate to the corresponding scope of the evaluation. Please download our Document Guide to see examples of documents you could upload to your questionnaire. Your documents will be treated confidentially, as stated in our T&Cs. For additional information about our internal information security procedures, see How does EcoVadis ensure the security of my data?

• What type of supporting documents can I provide?
• How will EcoVadis use my documents? Who has access to my documents?
• How does EcoVadis handle fraudulent supporting documents?
• How does EcoVadis verify the credibility of documents? 
• What are the consequences of submitting dubious documents? 

What type of supporting documents can I provide?

You can provide us with any formalized documents that reflect your company’s sustainability management system and support your answers to the questionnaire.

Here are some examples of documents that can be provided (for illustration only): sustainability management procedures, Sustainability Reports, Social Audit reports, HSE Policies, Code of Ethics/Conduct, Employee Handbooks, certificates (ISO14001, ISO45001, among others), UNGC (United Nations Global Compact) Communication on Progress, Annual Reports with Integrated sustainability section. Screenshots of your company’s intranet are also acceptable under specific conditions1.

If your company is extra small (XS), click here to see other examples of supporting documents we accept. 

All documents should be:

• Relevant and complete, as well as related to the corresponding scope of assessment;
• In one of these formats: .pdf, .docx, .doc, .xlsx, .xls, .jpg, .jpeg, .pptx, .ppt, .png, .txt, .odt, .bmp, .ods, .ott, .sxw, .stw.

  - Note: for “Upload a new document,” the file type "Adobe Acrobat Document" can cause uploading issues. In this case, please save the document as PDF to upload it;

  - Note: for “Upload a new link,” please provide only links to the webpage, not documents. The webpage will be captured and uploaded to your Document Library as a PDF. Only the specific webpage available under the link will be captured, not the entire website. Please ensure the link is valid and starts with http:// or https://.;
• Smaller than 30 MB;
• Reviewed regularly. There is a validity period of 8 years applied to both policies and actions and 2 years to KPI reporting;
• In-text format -- If your documents are not in English, French, Spanish, German, Chinese or Japanese, please send them coded as text, not as an image.

EcoVadis will not credit:

• Documents (commitments, actions, or reporting) created solely for satisfying the EcoVadis questionnaire will not be accepted;
• Objectives, actions, or reporting copied from another organization or online sources without reasonable evidence and assurance of implementation;
• Informal documentation (e.g. without the company’s name or logo, without the issue or review date, photos, etc.).
• Evidence in the form of embedded docs/weblinks (i.e. evidence should be shown in the document directly); analysts will not manually download any additional documentation from such links;
• Evidence not related to the 21 EcoVadis sustainability criteria.

*1. Screenshots of your company’s intranet should demonstrate elements of your management system that were outsourced or unavailable as documents. This typically only encompasses training modules for training courses. However, it will be acceptable if the evidence is part of your management system.

For more information and examples of documents that can be provided, please download our document guide or learn more about scope of assessment.

How will EcoVadis use my documents? Who has access to my documents?

Documents provided for the assessment will only be used to support the responses you provided on the assessment. Our Analyst team will review the documents during the evaluation, and they will only be shared with your trading partners if you explicitly request this.

When you upload a new document, you can choose whether to share it. If you share it, this document will be visible online to the trading partners with whom you decided to share your scorecard (sustainability rating result). EcoVadis is fully committed to ensuring the safety of our customers’ data and providing highly secured online solutions.

Each document that you have uploaded contains an expiry date. All documents uploaded onto your assessment will be considered in all following assessments until their expiry, and our system automatically removes these expired documents and any options attached to them. 

How does EcoVadis handle fraudulent supporting documents?

The EcoVadis Rating is evidence-based, requiring companies to provide formalized, recent, and pre-existing documentation that is a reliable element of the company’s sustainability management system. Since credible supporting documents are critical to the assessment, EcoVadis has a rigorous, multi-faceted program to verify the integrity of the evidence. 

The following documents will not be considered as evidence and will not be accepted:

• Documents (commitments, actions, and reporting) created solely for satisfying the EcoVadis questionnaire;
• Documents copied from another organization or online sources without reasonable evidence and assurance of implementation;
• Forged certificates.

How does EcoVadis verify the credibility of documents? 

EcoVadis has an internal mechanism in place to detect dubious documents. Additionally, our analysts can report doubtful cases to a special task force. We put certificates submitted through a systematic verification process to check their validity as well as the reliability of the certifying body. EcoVadis has also established a partnership with a software provider to detect the presence of plagiarized content. This accurate, reliable, and confidential tool allows our analysts to determine whether the documents are authentic, trustworthy, and credible.

What are the consequences of submitting dubious documents? 

Your documents will be rejected if they are found to be specifically prepared for our assessment or extensively plagiarized from external sources without an adequate level of adaptation. A specific comment from our analysts will also be shown on your company's scorecard and visible to the requesting companies. Finally, the requesting companies will be alerted if the documents you submitted are similar to documents of other companies assessed by EcoVadis or if forged certificates have been provided for the assessment. Therefore, submitting dubious documents could seriously affect your company and your relationship with your trading partners.

For more information and examples of documents that can be provided, please download our document guide.