Scope depends on your sector, your size and in some cases your role in society. Getting this right decides everything else. The Act lists sectors such as energy, transport, health, digital infrastructure and manufacturing of critical products. Medium and large organisations in those sectors are generally in scope, and some smaller ones are included because of what they provide.
What this means in practice
A useful test is to ask who would act on this tomorrow morning and what they would need. If the answer is unclear, the gap is organisational rather than technical, and that is usually the cheaper one to close.
Key actions
- Check your NACE codes against the sector annexes
- Count employees and turnover for the whole group, not one company
- Record the reasoning, even if you conclude you are out of scope
Next steps
Essential and important entities share the same core duties. The difference lies mainly in how actively the supervisor follows up and the level of fines. Keep the first version short. A one-page routine that people follow beats a long document nobody reads.