Conducting a Double Materiality Assessment (DMA) can seem overwhelming, as it dictates your entire reporting strategy. However, the Greenly platform translates this complex regulatory requirement into a structured, step-by-step digital workflow.
By evaluating how your company impacts the world (Impact Materiality) and how the world impacts your finances (Financial Materiality), you will scientifically filter the ESRS framework down to only the topics that matter to your business.
Step 1: High-Level Topic Screening
The platform covers 10 major sustainability matters directly aligned with the CSRD chapters (Environment, Social, Governance). Before diving into detailed questions, you must perform an initial screening.
Review the Landscape: Open the Materiality Assessment tab to view all available ESRS forms (e.g., E1 Climate Change, S1 Own Workforce).
Filter the Obvious: If an entire topic is fundamentally irrelevant to your business model (e.g., a software company evaluating Marine Resources), you can mark it as not material right away.
Mandatory Justification: If you choose to skip an entire ESRS topic, you must provide a written justification in the platform. External auditors will scrutinize this decision heavily.
Step 2: Delegate to Stakeholders
You should not complete the DMA alone. The philosophy of the assessment is to spread the completion load among relevant internal experts.
Ensure all necessary stakeholders (HR Directors, Facility Managers, Legal Counsel) are invited to your workspace.
Open an ESRS form in the Materiality Assessment module.
Use the top-right drop-down menu on specific questions to Assign them to the appropriate expert (e.g., assign supply chain questions to your Procurement Lead).
Step 3: Complete Questionnaires and Ensure Auditability
Your assigned stakeholders must now log in and answer their designated questions.
Qualitative Answers: The questions are high-level, qualitative, and closed-choice; they do not require deep scientific ESG expertise to answer. They are designed to gauge severity, scale, and likelihood of impacts and financial risks.
The Golden Rule of Auditability: Because DMA scoring is inherently subjective,you must use the comment boxes provided for each question. You must justify why you selected a specific answer. Without these written justifications, your external auditor cannot validate your thought process, putting your compliance at risk.
Step 4: Define Your Materiality Thresholds
Once your team completes 100% of the questionnaires, the system generates preliminary scores for every sub-topic. You must now define the exact threshold at which a score is deemed "Material."
Navigate to the Analytics tab.
Locate the slider bars for the Financial Threshold and Impact Threshold.
Adjust the sliders to fit your company's reality. Any sub-topic scoring above the threshold you set will become mandatory to report.
Warning: Be strategic. If you set the threshold too low, you will be overwhelmed with mandatory data collection. If you set it too high, your auditor will reject your assessment for hiding relevant risks. An appropriate configuration typically results in 20% to 50% of the total CSRD indicators becoming material.
Step 5: Review the Matrix and Freeze Results
After setting your thresholds, review the final outputs to ensure they align with your executive team's intuition.
Analyze the Matrix: Review the visual Materiality Matrix in the Analytics tab to see exactly which topics landed in the "Material" quadrant.
Define IROs: The system uses your material sub-topics to identify your specific Impacts, Risks, and Opportunities (IROs). These IROs must be explicitly disclosed in your final narrative report.
Freeze the Assessment: Once you are completely satisfied with the results, click the green Freeze My Results button. This locks your decisions and automatically populates the Data Collection tab with only the specific indicators you are legally required to answer.
(Note: If you have already completed a DMA outside of the platform using a consultant, you can skip the questionnaires and click the Import My Results button in the Analytics tab to directly map your offline results to the Greenly workspace.)