FAQs
The answers you need
on ESG reporting
How Squarely handles your disclosures, your data,
your stakeholders, and your report.
The basics
What Squarely is, who runs it, and where the platform stops.
What does Squarely do?
Squarely is an ESG data management and reporting platform. You define your reporting scope, gather data and evidence from across the business, process figures into structured results, and produce disclosures with a full trail behind every number.
Squarely is developed by Sustainable Square, an ESG advisory firm with 15 years of work across the GCC and MEA region. The platform carries that reporting practice into software.
Who uses Squarely inside an organisation?
Sustainability and ESG leads, compliance officers, finance, HR and operations contributors, external consultants, and the executives who sign off the final report. Auditors can be invited as viewers to read the history.
Contributors need no ESG background. Each person sees only the disclosures assigned to them, with the relevant guidance attached.
How is Squarely different from running the cycle in spreadsheets?
A spreadsheet holds numbers. Squarely holds the number, the evidence file, the named owner, the approval and the version history in one record.
When an assurance provider asks where a figure came from, you answer from the audit trail instead of searching old email threads.
Do we need technical skills to run it?
No. Contributors complete structured forms and attach evidence. Roles carry different permissions, so most people only need to learn their own screen, and the Squarely Chat answers platform questions in context.
Set-up work such as project structure, disclosure coverage and role assignment sits with your coordinator or your consultant, not with every contributor.
Does Squarely replace our ESG consultant?
No. Squarely removes the administrative load of collection, chasing and version control. Judgement on materiality, methodology and positioning stays with your team and your advisers.
Sustainable Square advisory support sits alongside the platform for teams who want it.
Coverage and scope
What you report against, across how many entities, and what comes out at the end.
Which frameworks and indexes does Squarely cover?
Squarely covers the frameworks and indexes you report to. Every disclosure you need sits in your project, and we add custom disclosures where your regulator or your index asks for something specific.
Tell us what your team reports against and we confirm exactly how each disclosure is set up in your project.
Are you certified or accredited for those frameworks?
Coverage sits in your project rather than in an accreditation document. Squarely holds no framework licence, and we make no certification claim.
Our consultants hold their own individual certifications and bring that expertise to how your disclosures are structured and reviewed.
Our regulator has added a new disclosure. Do you handle it?
Yes. Custom disclosures are added to your project with their own fields, owners, mandatory settings and collection frequency.
A new requirement becomes part of your normal cycle rather than a separate exercise on the side.
We report across several entities. Can Squarely cover them all?
Yes. You can have one main project with a subproject for each entity, copying disclosures across rather than rebuilding them for each one.
Data aggregation gives you the group-level status of a shared disclosure and a view for each entity, so gaps surface long before the deadline while each entity keeps its own owners and evidence. Access across the main project and subprojects is governed by roles and permissions defined by the client during onboarding.
What about emissions calculations?
Scope 1 and Scope 2 calculations run inside the platform, with the applied factor recorded and the evidence attached.
Charts use the same approved figures, including trends across previous reporting years, so the numbers and the narrative stay aligned.
What do we get at the end of a cycle?
A structured, approved dataset; the evidence library behind it; charts built from the approved figures; a structured data export; and a reviewed first draft of the report narrative in Word, ready for final polish, design and sign-off.
Data, access and security
Where your data sits, who sees it, how it moves, and how records hold up under assurance.
Who sees our data inside the platform?
Access follows roles. Employees see only their assigned disclosures. Managers review and validate team submissions. Project Coordinators run the reporting lifecycle, including narrative drafting. Auditors can be invited to view data and read the history.
Structural controls such as user and company creation stay with administrators.
Where is our data held?
By default, client data and files are stored in AWS Singapore. In-country storage can be arranged on request, subject to agreement before onboarding.
Can we export our data?
Project data and approved drafts export in structured formats, and the audit history stays visible alongside them.
Do we carry data forward between reporting years?
Yes. Previous cycles remain available for comparison, trend charts and year-on-year commentary.
Your second reporting cycle starts from an existing structure, named owners and a settled methodology, rather than a blank page.
Onboarding and pricing
What happens after you say yes, and what the commitment looks like.
How long does onboarding take?
Onboarding covers project structure, disclosure coverage, user roles and team training. Timing depends on your scope, entity count and the disclosures you report against.
We estimate it during the demo based on your actual reporting calendar, not a standard template.
What support do we get after launch?
In-platform guidance, documentation at docs.squarely.tech, the Squarely Chat for platform questions, and a support team you reach directly.
Deadlines trigger automated reminders and escalations, so the platform follows up with contributors instead of you doing it by email.
How is Squarely priced?
Pricing reflects your scope: the entities covered, the users involved, the disclosures in play and the level of advisory support you want.
Send us your reporting scope through the contact form and we'll provide a figure built around it.
We manage ESG reporting for several clients. Does Squarely work for us?
Yes. Consultants and agencies run separate client environments, each with its own structure, stakeholders and reporting calendar.
Methodology stays consistent across the portfolio, which keeps quality steady as the client list grows.
Auto Drafting
AI with humans in the loop.
Does the AI generate the report automatically?
No. Drafting happens section by section, with your review and approval at each step.
Nothing reaches your Word export before you have signed it off. Revoking an approval with a reason sends the section back to drafting.
Do we lock the report structure before drafting starts?
You lock your table of contents to begin mapping disclosures, then add, remove or reorder chapters and sections later in the process.
The structure stays flexible through drafting, not only at set-up.
How long does Auto Drafting take?
A single section can be drafted in minutes, and you can move from approved data to a reviewed first draft in days, depending on your team's review time.
Will the AI write something inaccurate?
Auto Drafting writes only from your approved data and its supporting evidence, so the quality of the draft depends on the quality and mapping of that data.
Squarely keeps people in the loop: every piece of AI-generated content is reviewed by a person before it moves forward.
How much control do we have over the writing?
You set the language (UK or US English), voice and any naming instructions before drafting starts, then give instructions for each section on length, structure and what to cover.
Each section is generated, edited and saved on your terms. Your reviewer can approve it or comment on the changes they want.
Which AI model do you use, and do you train on our data?
Squarely uses a range of OpenAI and Anthropic models through AWS Bedrock within our AWS infrastructure. Customer data is not shared with model providers or other third parties.
Squarely does not train its own models, and your data is not used to improve any model. AWS privacy guarantees apply to all Squarely AI features, including Auto Drafting.
Does Auto Drafting replace final editing and sign-off?
No. Auto Drafting delivers a structured first draft.
Final polish, formatting, design and approval stay with your team and your advisers.
Smart Import
From the files you already hold to disclosures ready for review.
Does Smart Import connect to our ERP or HR system?
Smart Import is our first level of integration and works from files. Export a file from your ERP, HR system or utility portal, upload it, and Squarely pre-fills the matching disclosures.
No system access or IT project is needed.
Which files can we upload?
Smart Import supports Office files, TXT, images and PDFs; PDF is the preferred format. Scanned documents are also supported, and you can reuse files from earlier imports.
Can we trust the figures it pre-fills?
Smart Import uses a proprietary algorithm to extract data into a usable format, then uses AI to map it to your selected disclosures and assess the results.
Each value shows its source document, page and quoted text, along with an AI confidence score. Values below 65% are marked as Needs review.
Nothing is approved until a person on your team approves it.
Will an import overwrite approved data?
No. Squarely never overwrites data submitted by a person. Approved, locked and Do not report periods do not accept imported data.
Imported values are marked as pending and require human review and approval, in line with the project's roles and permissions.
Who on our team can use Smart Import?
Every licence type can run an import, but only into the subtopics assigned to that person.
Each import is logged in the Import Center with the uploader's name, the files and what was written.