I enjoyed reading Brad Monterio’s two articles in Strategic Finance on Sustainability Reporting and XBRL and noted that the Gaffers at the IIRC have come up with a new acronym: GAFIR – a Generally Accepted Framework for Integrated Reporting. According to Brad’s article, we might have a GAFIR by 2020, but then again we might not. Now I’m not too fond of waiting a decade for someone else to figure out stuff that I could probably figure out for myself. So I developed a sustainability performance management application to feed our own Rivet Crossfire, which turned out to be a great way to start thinking seriously about holistic reporting formats.
It didn’t take long to come up with two new report formats – I call them Big 4 Impact and the Sustainability Balance Sheet. These reports are generated directly from the sustainability performance data that you ‘collect’ and evidence in the system.
The Big 4 Impact report simply puts four major sustainability issues: Emissions, Energy, Waste and Water on a single page as shown below (demo data) reporting consumption/generation along with mitigation to calculate a realistic impact statement:
holostx-impact
The Sustainability Balance Sheet creates a new report format for measuring, monitoring and managing your sustainability momentum based on Investment (in sustainability activities), Benefits (gained from sustainability activities) and Goodwill (accumulated by sustainability activities).
holostx-momentum
What’s this got to do with XBRL? Well, all the sustainability data collected in this app can be mapped to XBRL taxonomy elements then exported to an XBRL-aware reporting system – like Rivet Crossfire – so that, for example, GRI Indicator data can be combined with SEC GAAP data to produce a truly holistic report with drillaround/down between the two.
Now that’s the power of XBRL for driving the holistic reporting agenda forward.
Tags: holostx
