A compliance consultant and a self-serve passport tool solve different parts of the same problem. A consultant interprets the regulation for your specific situation and can advise on edge cases; a self-serve tool turns a settled understanding into published passports, repeatably, for every battery you place on the market. The two are often complementary rather than mutually exclusive.
| Dimension | Compliance consultant | Self-serve tool |
|---|---|---|
| Cost shape | Priced per engagement or hour | Published plans, extra passports priced openly |
| Time to first passport | Depends on availability and scope | Set by your data, self-serve |
| Output | Advice and a point-in-time deliverable | Published, tier-gated passports |
| Repeatability | Re-engagement for each new run | Run again for every battery, unchanged process |
| Per-battery scale (Art. 77(1)) | Manual effort grows with volume | Same process at any volume |
| 10-year retention | Not typically provided | Provided as a service |
Where each fits
- Consultant: unusual product configurations, scope questions, or one-off regulatory interpretation.
- Self-serve tool: producing and retaining compliant per-battery passports at a predictable cost.
- Together: take advice once, then run the repeatable process yourself for every battery.
The key limitation of a consultant-only approach is repeatability: every new product line or volume increase can mean another engagement, while the passports themselves still need a durable home for the retention period. A self-serve tool absorbs the repeated production and long-term retention as a service.
Frequently asked
Do I still need a consultant if I use a self-serve tool?
Not necessarily. A self-serve tool maps the Annex XIII fields and the per-battery model for you. A consultant can still add value for unusual configurations or one-off interpretation questions, but the routine production of passports does not require one.
Why might a tool be more cost-effective than a consultant?
A consultant is priced per engagement and produces a point-in-time deliverable, while a tool offers published monthly plans and a repeatable process. As volume grows, a plan with openly priced extra passports is usually more predictable than repeated engagements.