This assumes a small dedicated team — often one or two people wearing this hat alongside other responsibilities, which is the reality at most MSME exporters. Each phase is scoped to fit that reality.
Weeks 1–2
Register your installation(s) and confirm which goods, production processes, and precursor suppliers are actually in scope. Assign roles: who has admin rights, who enters monthly data, who eventually manages verification — these should not all default to the same overloaded person if you can help it, since verification is meant to be a separate check on the data, not a rubber stamp by whoever entered it.
Deliverable: a registered installation, a list of in-scope goods, and a named owner for monthly data entry.
Weeks 3–6
Start capturing source streams (fuel and process emissions), indirect emissions (grid electricity, on-site generation), and process inputs and outputs for one full calendar month. Don't wait for a "clean" month to start — the point of this phase is building the habit and finding the gaps, not producing a perfect first report.
Deliverable: one complete month of source stream and indirect emissions data, entered and reviewed.
Weeks 7–10
Add production process data (volumes, attributed emissions) and purchased precursor data (quantities, supplier-declared or default-value SEE). This is where the specific embedded emissions (SEE) calculation actually comes together — and where a missing precursor supplier response first becomes visible as a real gap, not a hypothetical one. Chase that gap now, while there's time to get a real answer instead of falling back to a default value by default.
Deliverable: a complete monthly Emissions & Energy Summary, reconciled against source stream and process data.
Weeks 11–12
With three months of real practice behind you, write the monitoring methodology properly: roles and responsibilities, data sources, sampling approach, what happens when a data point is estimated rather than measured. This is far easier to write accurately now, describing what you actually do, than it would have been to write speculatively in Phase 1.
Deliverable: a documented monitoring plan, reviewed by whoever will eventually face a verifier's questions about it.
Ongoing
Monthly data entry becomes routine, not a project. Review completion and data quality quarterly — a supplier who stopped sending precursor data, a source stream nobody's touched in two months — before it becomes a scramble at reporting time. Bring in an accredited verifier once you have a real reporting period's worth of data to show them, and treat the first engagement as a dry run for the ones that matter.
Deliverable: a Summary Communication your team trusts, and a verifier's opinion that confirms it.
Twelve weeks to a first real, reviewable reporting period — not twelve weeks to full mastery of the regulation. The goal of this playbook is momentum, not perfection. Perfection comes from the second, third, and fourth reporting cycle, once the habit is already built.
EnaQt CBAM Verify's guided screens follow this same phased structure — registration, monthly capture, monitoring plan, verification — so your team never has to guess what comes next.
Explore EnaQt CBAM Verify Read the Getting Started GuideOr skip ahead — check your exposure first with the CBAM Exposure Calculator →