It's not just the hours, it's what those hours are pulling your team away from.
Sustainability reporting in Canada isn't a "someday" concern anymore. Fasken's 2026 ESG Disclosure Study, which surveyed 100 companies on the Toronto Stock Exchange, found that most companies are now deepening their climate disclosures, reporting full greenhouse gas inventories, maintaining reduction targets, and increasingly reporting against multiple frameworks (ISSB, SASB, TCFD, and GRI) at once. The Canadian Sustainability Standards Board has also finalized its own disclosure standards (CSDS 1 and CSDS 2), giving Canadian companies a more consistent baseline to report against. This remains voluntary for now, but a clear signal of where mandatory requirements are headed.
In other words: the bar for what counts as credible reporting keeps rising. Most teams are still clearing it the same way they always have, by hand.
The numbers are more widespread than you'd think
Ask most sustainability or facilities teams how they put together their energy and emissions reports, and the honest answer is usually the same: spreadsheets, stitched together by hand, once a month or once a quarter, under deadline pressure.
In a 2024 survey of 550 executives and board members, KPMG US found that nearly half of companies still rely on spreadsheets as their primary tool for managing ESG data, even though 90% of those same companies said they planned to increase ESG-related investment over the next three years. A separate EY survey of chief accounting officers and controllers at large US companies found a similar pattern: 55% of companies still house ESG data in spreadsheets, and when asked to rate their own level of reporting automation on a scale of 1–10, the average self-reported score was 3.5.
More recently, PwC's Global Sustainability Reporting Survey found that among companies now reporting under newer frameworks like CSRD or ISSB - the same international standards Canadian companies are increasingly aligning with - over half cite data quality
as their single biggest challenge. As reporting frameworks converge globally, that's exactly the kind of problem manual, spreadsheet-based processes are unerequipped to solve.
In other words: most companies already know this process is manual and under-automated. They're just not sure what to do about it yet.
Where the hours actually go
GreenBiz's 2025 State of the Profession survey, which polled more than 1,200 corporate sustainability professionals, found that heads of sustainability work an average of 50–56 hours a week - and that 35–40% of that time goes specifically to ESG reporting and regulatory compliance, not strategy or program work.
Separately, research on chief sustainability officers found they're fielding an average of roughly 50 ESG-related surveys and disclosure requests a year, each with around 50 questions, consuming close to half their total working hours just responding to inquiries.
Put plainly: for a lot of sustainability leaders, reporting isn't a task that happens alongside the real work. It is most of the work.
The real cost isn't just the hours
If reporting were the job, this wouldn't be a problem; it would be the job. But for most teams, reporting is supposed to be the byproduct of the work, not the work itself. Every hour spent reconciling a spreadsheet or chasing down a utility bill is an hour not spent on the initiatives the report is supposed to be measuring in the first place.
There's also a quieter cost: manual processes are error-prone by nature. A wrong number, a missed bill, a formula that breaks when someone edits the wrong cell do not announce themselves. They just sit in the report, potentially in front of a board, an insurer, or an auditor, looking exactly as credible as everything else on the page.
What actually changes this
None of this is really a "try harder" problem. It's a tooling problem. The surveys above are consistent on one thing: most companies aren't lacking awareness that manual reporting is costly - they're lacking a practical alternative that doesn't mean ripping out every existing process.
That's the specific gap Askiy is built for: pulling bills, interval data, and market data automatically, verifying all of it, and producing reports your team doesn't have to assemble by hand every month. So the hours currently going into reporting can go back into the work the reporting was supposed to be about.
See how much manual work Askiy could take off your plate.
