About AnswerVault

The problem I kept watching people lose to

A 60-person manufacturer in the Midlands gets an ESG questionnaire from their largest customer. 200 questions. Three weeks to respond. The sustainability work falls to whoever has the bandwidth — usually a quality manager, an operations lead, or the owner. They open last year's response (a Word doc, last edited by someone who's left), open this year's questionnaire (different format, mostly the same questions), and start rewriting.

It takes 2–5 days. ISO certificates are hunted across email and shared drives. Numbers are pulled from spreadsheets nobody's touched since the last audit. The finished response goes out with no version history and no evidence trail. Three weeks later a different buyer sends a different questionnaire asking 80% of the same things, and the cycle starts again.

I watched UK SMEs work through this every quarter and every supplier ask. Most of the answers were the same across questionnaires. None of the work carried forward.

Why I built it this way

The obvious tools don't fit. Spreadsheets don't track who changed what. ChatGPT drafts answers but has no provenance — an auditor asking “where did this number come from?” gets a shrug. Enterprise platforms like EcoVadis and Worldfavor exist for the company sending the questionnaire, not the supplier answering it, and start at £5k+ per year. The supplier-side workflow has been left alone.

AnswerVault treats your answers as facts you build once and reuse: a structured vault with an evidence library attached, designed so that the second questionnaire is hours rather than days, and the tenth is a review pass rather than a rebuild. The unit of work is the fact, not the document — a fact about your environmental management system doesn't need to be re-stated for Sedex, EcoVadis, PPN 06/21 and a customer-bespoke survey just because the wording differs.

What it actually does

Concrete behaviour, not promises:

• Fact Vault. Your reusable answers, with version history and append-only audit log. 40 starter facts pre-loaded across environment, social, governance, supply chain, and company overview so you're not staring at a blank screen.
• Document Library. ISO certificates, policy PDFs, energy bills — uploaded once, linked to the facts they support, and tracked centrally so an expired ISO 14001 cert doesn't silently ship inside next quarter's response.
• Smart Suggestions. Paste a question, get the matching fact from your vault — even when this year's questionnaire words it differently from last year's. Tuned across 65+ ways the same ESG concept gets phrased in different questionnaires, so “modern slavery statement”, “human rights policy” and “Section 54 disclosure” surface the same underlying fact rather than three near-duplicates.
• Multi-format export with SHA-256 checksums. PDF, XLSX and ZIP outputs include a cover page, table of contents, responses, evidence manifest, and a SHA-256 checksum on the export filename. The checksum line is the one I haven't seen another supplier-side tool ship — it's what makes a buyer's auditor accept the export as evidence rather than “a PDF someone sent us”.
• Append-only audit log + tier-based retention. Every fact change, document upload, and export is logged. Retention runs 90 days on Starter, 1 year on Professional, 2 years on Business — sized to match what an external auditor will ask for at each firm size.

The audit-survivable bit

The reason the export pipeline ships SHA-256 checksums and an append-only audit log isn't aesthetic. It's because the people on the other end of these questionnaires — procurement teams, EcoVadis analysts, ISO auditors — are trained to reject evidence that can't be tied to a tamper-evident trail. A response that survives an EcoVadis Gold-tier evidence review needs a per-answer provenance chain: which fact, which document, which version, untouched between export and inbox.

That discipline is what I want a UK SME to be able to demonstrate without hiring a consultant or buying a £15k/year platform. The checksummed-export and audit-log primitives are how AnswerVault gets there at £19–£59 per month.

Who it's for

Operations directors, sustainability leads, quality and compliance managers, and owner-MDs at UK SMEs (10–250 employees) in manufacturing, construction, professional services, and supply chain — anyone who handles 3–15 ESG questionnaires per year from customers, banks, or large buyers and is currently rebuilding answers from scratch each time.

Less of a fit if you have a dedicated ESG team with existing tooling, answer fewer than two questionnaires per year, or need ESRS-grade CSRD report generation — that's a different category of product.

Who's behind it

I'm Brian Crocker, sole director of Crocker Digital Ltd. AnswerVault is one of a focused portfolio of UK compliance tools built and operated by Crocker Digital. The model is deliberate: small, focused operations shipping faster than enterprise vendors and held to a single point of accountability. Email support@answervault.co.uk reaches me directly — if a feature is half-built or missing, you'll get a straight answer rather than a roadmap deflection.

The service is hosted in the UK/EU on Supabase and Netlify, with payments handled by Stripe. The 14-day trial requires no credit card. If you cancel from the Stripe customer portal, your subscription stops at the end of the current billing period and your data is retained for 30 days in case you change your mind. The underlying detail lives on our security, sub-processors, data retention, and privacy policy pages.

Get in touch

Questions about AnswerVault, feedback on a questionnaire workflow we're missing, or you want to share what your last EcoVadis or Sedex response cost you in time? I read every email.

support@answervault.co.uk