Do You Need a GHG Consultant, or Can You DIY Scope 1 & 2?
The honest answer is "it depends," but the factors it depends on are specific enough to actually work through.
This is the question every first-time filer eventually asks, and the honest answer is "it depends," but the factors it depends on are specific enough to actually work through, rather than just going with your gut.
When a consultant is the right call
A few situations genuinely point toward outside help. If you operate across multiple facilities with complicated ownership, joint ventures, recent acquisitions, entities where the "who owns these emissions" question isn't obvious, the organizational boundary decision alone involves real judgment calls that are easy to get wrong on a first attempt. If nobody internally has meaningful, protected time to own this (not "fit it in around your actual job," but real dedicated hours), a rushed internal effort tends to cost more in redo time than it saves in consulting fees. And if your timeline is genuinely tight with no room for a first-attempt learning curve, or your leadership wants outside validation regardless of internal capability, those are legitimate reasons to bring someone in.
When DIY genuinely works
On the other side: if your footprint is straightforward, one or a handful of facilities, a limited fleet, standard HVAC and refrigeration, a single set of utility accounts, the complexity that makes consultants valuable mostly isn't present. If someone internally can actually dedicate focused time to this, not squeeze it in, DIY is realistic. And if you're only dealing with Scope 1 and Scope 2 (not the much harder Scope 3 problem), the work is bounded and learnable: there's a finite set of categories to work through, not an open-ended research project.
The honest middle ground
Most companies aren't cleanly in either camp: moderate complexity, moderate internal capacity. For that group, the real obstacle to DIY usually isn't effort, it's not knowing what you don't know. The GHG Protocol is complete but assumes familiarity you don't have yet, and the mistakes that turn a DIY effort into a costly redo (the ones covered in the 4 places first-time inventories go wrong) are exactly the kind of thing nobody catches until they've either done this before or had someone point them out. A structured framework built around those specific failure points can close most of that gap without requiring you to hire outside help, as long as your underlying operations aren't unusually complex.
What to actually do next
Regardless of which path fits your situation, the Scope 1 & 2 Data Collection Checklist is a reasonable first step either way. It tells you what to go collect before you decide whether you need help interpreting it. If you work through it and the boundary questions or the volume of judgment calls start feeling out of your depth, that's a real signal worth listening to, not a failure. And if you're the kind of team that could DIY this with more structure than a blank GHG Protocol document gives you, more built-out resources for exactly that are in the works, worth staying on the list for.