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Every organisation wants stronger ESG performance. Investment is rising, ambition is high, and new tools are everywhere. Yet the core bottleneck remains unchanged.
TripShift’s research shows that a typical sustainability manager earns an average of £60,000 and spends around 85% of their time collecting and cleaning data. That’s over £51,000 a year spent on manual work instead of strategy.
It isn’t a skills gap or a technology gap, it’s a workflow problem at the heart of almost every ESG process. The bottleneck quietly slowing the entire system.
Where the Slowdown Really Starts
Most ESG platforms promise automation, yet nearly all of them rely on the same raw inputs. Exports from finance, ad-hoc spreadsheets from HR, travel data pulled from emails, receipts, or expense systems. All in different formats, from different time periods, and with different levels of detail.
Before anything can be analysed, someone has to make sense of it. That someone is usually the sustainability lead, who spends most of their job rebuilding a dataset that should exist at the touch of a button.
Verse, Inc. highlights how energy and sustainability leads often struggle to identify and collect fragmented information spread across spreadsheets and departments. They describe one Fortune 1000 company that manually inputs energy data from its two largest facilities and then estimates the figures for every other site. It is a workflow that frustrates both sustainability teams and finance teams and one that mirrors the challenges many organisations face when relying on manual reporting.
No software can deliver accurate insights if its data pipeline is still being maintained by hand.
The Cross Department Drain No One Notices
Manual sustainability reporting not only drains the sustainability team, it quietly absorbs time across the whole organisation.
Finance teams lose more than 100 hours a year extracting transport related expenses.
HR teams lose more than 50 hours compiling employee travel data.
Operations lose more than 50 hours filling in gaps or reconstructing missing information.
Add that together and the organisation is losing more than £10,000 of internal capacity each year because its ESG data structure has not evolved.
The Commercial Impact: Slow Data Means Slow Responses
Around 30% of RFPs now require strong evidence of emissions performance. Competitors with automated reporting can deliver this within days, yet businesses relying on spreadsheets can often take weeks, sometimes months.
That delay has real consequences; Incomplete responses, lower quality scores and a weaker positioning against competitors with better data.
TripShift’s modelling suggests this lag can cost between £100,000 and £200,000 in missed opportunities each year.
The Audit Burden That Keeps Getting Bigger
When travel and mobility data is collected manually, verification becomes harder every year. Spreadsheets multiply, methodologies drift, and no two teams record information in the same way. The result is predictable. Audit preparation jumps to 80-120 hours and external verification costs rise to between £15,000-25,00. Regulatory risk under SECR and CSRD also increases, with financial penalties that can reach hundreds of thousands.
The root cause is always the same: the underlying dataset is too fragmented to defend.
The Bigger Picture: The £51,000 Problem Is Only the Start
The £51,000 tied up in a sustainability manager’s admin workload is the visible part of a much deeper issue. It signals a pattern across organisations where manual reporting does more than slow teams down. It drags accuracy, confidence, and decision making with it.
When most of a sustainability professional’s role is spent gathering data, there is barely any time left for the work that actually drives progress. Behaviour change, supplier engagement, performance improvement, planning for the year ahead. All of it is sidelined because the data takes too long to collect and too long to trust.
The expectations on these teams are only getting heavier. A recent Business Times analysis shows ESG functions being absorbed into finance, audit, risk, and compliance. Boards and investors are asking for reporting that is as reliable as financial data. As the article puts it, “Less rhetoric around ESG does not mean there is less appetite for evidence.”
Rising Expectations, Shrinking Capacity
Sustainability leads are being pushed into more detailed, more defensible reporting. They are being asked to link environmental performance to financial performance and to bring clarity to the operational risks behind it. In the words of one of the executives interviewed, organisations are now “tasked with something much more fundamental”, placing sustainability leaders at the centre of how the business operates.
TripShift’s interviews with over 120 sustainability leads show the weight of this shift. Only 3% said they were very happy with their current reporting system, with half saying they were unhappy. The common frustrations were predictable but telling. Supplier data collection, tool fragmentation, and manual harmonisation are all pulling teams away from strategy and deeper into administration.
Many businesses are paying for a strategist but using them as a data collector and if the workflow stays the same, so will the outcomes.
Empowering sustainability teams starts with removing the work that blocks their impact and giving them time to do the job they were hired for.
Where TripShift Fits
TripShift removes the bottleneck at its source by automating mobility emissions data and taking the manual burden out of reporting. No spreadsheets, no exports, no reconstruction and no cross department chasing for numbers.
Businesses using TripShift gain:
- Accurate mobility emissions ready for reporting and audit
- Faster and more competitive RFP responses
- Lower verification and preparation costs
- Fewer internal hours tied up in data collection
- More time for sustainability teams to focus on the work that moves the needle
- Teams who are more motivated, more effective, and able to operate at the strategic level they were hired for
Help your sustainability teams reclaim their time and build a data foundation the whole organisation can trust. If you would like to see how it works in practice, the TripShift team would love to take you through it.
