Chases primary returns out of tier one and tier two, and names in writing every supplier whose figure is still an estimate.
Purchased goods and services is typically half of a company's Scope 3 and almost always the half that nobody has measured. The standard response is to multiply spend by an industry average and move on. That produces a number, and the number is wrong in a direction nobody can tell you.
The alternative is slower and duller: write a survey a supplier can complete without hiring a consultant, send it to tier one, and then have somebody whose job that week is chasing it actually chase it.
Returns are reconciled against the purchase ledger before they are used, because a supplier's idea of what they sold you and your ledger's idea often differ. Where the two cannot be made to agree, the line stays in the register as unreconciled rather than being rounded quietly into place and forgotten.
There is a point at which the cost of chasing a supplier exceeds the precision it buys, and that point is set in writing at the start with a spend threshold attached. Without it the work expands quietly until somebody calls a halt, and then the boundary has moved after the counting began.
A supplier who never answered is a line in the register with their name on it. An average dressed up as a measurement is worse than an honest gap.
Far easier. The survey already exists, most of tier one has answered once, and the chase starts from a list of people who know what is being asked. The expensive year is the first one.
