BRSR filing, without the annual scramble.
Chaperone holds your ESG evidence through the year and flags what is missing while it can still be retrieved. BRSR Close then drafts the disclosure across all nine principles, with your team approving every figure.
Request a walkthrough →Built in consultation with, and validated by, a leading ESG and climate-reporting advisory, part of an established audit and advisory firm that provides BRSR assurance to listed companies.
One system, two halves.
The filing problem has two parts. The evidence has to exist and be findable, and the disclosure has to be drafted from it. Most tools address the second part and assume the first has been solved.
This is the year the assurance glide path reaches everyone in scope.
Most of a filing is assembly.
A BRSR filing is a judgement exercise that runs mostly on clerical work. Collecting records, chasing what did not arrive, and reconciling what did will absorb the bulk of the hours, and the parts that need expertise get whatever is left. Holding the evidence through the year moves that balance.
Illustrative of where effort concentrates in a BRSR filing, drawn from how the work is commonly described. Proportions are not a measured benchmark and will differ by footprint and scope.
And the review exposure. Reasonable assurance tests the trail rather than the template. A filing that produces provenance as the work happens raises fewer queries and needs less rework, which is time nobody plans for.
And it compounds. The operational profile, the estimation bases and the approvals given are recorded once. Each subsequent cycle inherits them, so the work reduces year on year rather than resetting to a blank template.
A year that keeps its own records.
Everything happens at the end.
The filing window opens and the collection begins. Bills for months that closed a year ago are requested from branches where the person who filed them has since moved on. Sites with no water meter become a figure arrived at under time pressure.
Someone senior spends weeks coordinating people who do not report to them. When the assurance provider asks where a number came from, the answer is reconstructed from memory and email.
The evidence is already in.
Documents arrive through the year and are read, classified, and placed against the site and period they belong to. What has not come in is flagged early enough to be chased while the record still exists.
Sites without metering are known in advance, with the estimation basis agreed once and applied consistently. By the time the window opens, most of the disclosure is drafted and every figure has its provenance attached.
An AI compliance manager for ESG evidence.
Chaperone reads documents where they arrive, places each record against the site and period it belongs to, and knows what has not come in. It runs continuously rather than at filing time.
What it covers, and what it does not. Chaperone works on the disclosures that rest on documents: energy, water, fuel, waste, emissions, and the HR and spend records behind the quantitative fields. That is where the volume sits, and Principle 6 alone usually takes more of a filing than any other section. Policies, board composition and the narrative disclosures have no document to gather, so BRSR Close asks your representative for those directly.
The disclosure, drafted in conversation.
BRSR Close works through all nine principles with your nominated representative, drafting from the evidence Chaperone already holds and asking only for what the documents cannot answer.
Who holds the pen. The system carries the template structure, the unit conversions, the consolidation arithmetic, and the cross-references. Your representative carries the judgement, and the filing remains the company's throughout.
A conversation, not a form.
An excerpt from a demonstration session. A site has no water meter, so a figure has to be estimated. What follows is how the system handles a number that cannot simply be read off a bill.
- Are bathing or shower facilities available for the engineers?
- Is the water used only for domestic purposes such as drinking, sanitation and cleaning, or also in industrial processes, cooling or manufacturing?
- Do you have meter readings or tanker supply logs, or shall I proceed on benchmark data under IS 1172:1993 (Reaffirmed 2021), Code of basic requirements for water supply, drainage and sanitation?
→ 4 factories × 45 engineers = 180 people
→ 8.1 kilolitres per day
→ approximately 2,958 kilolitres per year, at full-time operation
I will record this as an estimated domestic water figure, on IS 1172:1993 (Reaffirmed 2021). Can your assurance provider accept an estimated benchmark value for water use in this section?
Returning to energy. Could you confirm whether the Pune office units cover the whole company's electricity use, or whether other sites and operations also consume electricity or fuel that should be added before we finalise the total?
Three things are happening here. The system qualifies before it calculates, because the same standard allows 45 or 135 litres depending on facilities and the difference is threefold. It separates domestic water from process water, which cannot be inferred from headcount at all. And it will not let an estimate pass as a measurement without the standard cited and the assurance provider's position on record.
Coordination is solved. Judgement is not.
Reporting software has become good at moving work around an organisation: owners assigned, templates issued, reminders sent, entries validated, progress shown on a dashboard. None of that decides what the number should be.
Reasonable assurance changes what a good answer looks like. It is a higher bar than the limited assurance the EU's CSRD initially sets, and it asks for source-traced evidence: calculation sheets, plant-level records, emission factors, and approval trails. Four quarters of it, rather than a figure reconstructed in the final month.
That is a burden of reasoning, not of coordination. An assurer does not ask whether a reminder was sent. They ask which standard the water estimate rests on, who accepted it, and why the same basis was used across sites. Those answers have to be recorded when the figure is made, because they cannot be recovered afterwards.
Sources: SEBI Circular SEBI/HO/CFD/CFD-SEC-2/P/CIR/2023/122 dated 12 July 2023, establishing the BRSR Core assurance glide path from the top 150 listed entities in FY 2023-24 to the top 1,000 in FY 2026-27; SEBI master circular for listed entities as amended December 2024. Characterisation of currently available tooling reflects publicly published product descriptions across the category, and names no individual vendor.
Operated by you, not around you.
A good deal of this work is run by advisory firms on behalf of their clients, and a firm carrying twenty filings carries the same collection problem twenty times over. Where that applies, four things matter.
Worth asking.
Does our data leave our environment?
No data is retained by Mitochondria. Documents are processed transiently through our cloud infrastructure, encrypted in transit and at rest, and the output is returned to your nominated workspace. Mitochondria is ISO 27001:2022 certified, and the connection model and data handling terms are set out in our DPA, aligned with the GDPR, UK GDPR, and India's DPDP Act. Where a sector requires it, deployment within your own environment is available.
We are already mid-year. Do we have to wait to start?
No. Chaperone can be pointed at what you already hold, which establishes where you stand for the current year and what is missing from it. The continuous model then applies from that point forward. Starting mid-cycle means the first year captures less than a full one, and the gaps it surfaces are still worth knowing before the window opens.
How does this help with BRSR Core assurance?
Reasonable assurance asks for source-traced evidence rather than a completed template. Because every figure is linked to the document or conversation it came from, and because estimates carry the standard applied and the approval given, the trail an assurer asks for is produced as the work happens rather than assembled afterwards. Where the same basis is used across sites and periods, that consistency is on the record too.
What about sections that no document can answer?
Much of the BRSR, including board composition, policies, stakeholder engagement, and ethics disclosures, is answered in conversation. The system asks your representative directly, explains what each field requires, and records the response against the field. Documents are one input path rather than the only one.
How does estimation work where there is no meter?
The system asks what it needs in order to choose the right basis, then states the standard it is applying, shows the calculation, labels the result as an estimate, and asks whether your assurance provider accepts an estimated value for that field. The assumption and the approval are recorded alongside the figure, so the same basis is applied in later cycles rather than reopened each year.
How does the SEBI taxonomy alignment work?
The output is aligned to the SEBI BRSR taxonomy used by the exchange submission utility. Final validation against the current taxonomy happens through the exchange's own utility. Where SEBI amends the schema, the field mapping is updated to follow it.
How well does the system understand the disclosure itself?
It was built in consultation with, and validated by, a leading ESG and climate-reporting advisory, part of an established audit and advisory firm that provides BRSR assurance to listed companies. Its leadership reviewed the working demonstrations and approved both the approach and the output. The disclosure expertise and the engineering sit in the same build, which is why the system asks the questions an assurance review would.
How does this work with our assurance provider?
Every value is traceable to a specific document, a recorded conversation, or a calculated field with its inputs visible. Your assurance provider reviews the same artefact your team does, with no parallel workflow to reconcile.
What happens next year, and what if we leave?
The prior year's context carries forward, so the following cycle opens with what has changed rather than a blank template. Your completed filings and your evidence estate are exportable at any point. If you do not return, you keep everything.
What does it cost?
A single listed entity is priced per filing, annually. An advisory practice running filings for several clients moves to an annual practice licence. The range depends on operational footprint and document volume, and is discussed during the walkthrough.
Compliance beyond the filing.
The rest of the compliance estate
A utility bill is missing or it is not. Licences, consents to operate, contractor compliance and certifications turn instead on validity dates. Chaperone holds those alongside your ESG records, and raises an expiry weeks before it lapses.
Chaperone for compliance →How the system is held to account
A filing that carries an AI-drafted figure invites a question about the AI. Our position on how the models are used, where they are constrained, and what is logged is published in full, with ISO 27001:2022 certification behind it.
Responsible AI →