Circular economy (CE) and sustainability are high on the political agenda of governments nationally and internationally. Governments are developing instruments to stimulate the CE, but without monitoring in place, these measures can be subject to abuse, failing to achieve the desired effects. CE monitoring, however, is still a nascent topic in academic literature. In this paper we propose the concept of the extended data pipeline to support CE visibility. Governments, but also banks and auditing firms can use this visibility to monitor CE flows to design and evaluate instruments and measures to enhance the CE.