The news that B Corp is revving up its sustainability rating system provides another perfect use case for a new XBRL taxonomy to help with sustainability reporting. As GreenBiz reports:
“This is B Lab’s effort to launch a rating system that focuses not on the financial performance of companies and funds, but instead, their social and environmental impact,” Houlahan said, “creating a global, comparable system that allows investors and institutions to unlock a huge amount of capital to flow into impact investing.”
To participate in B Corp ‘s Global Impact Investing Rating (GIIR) system you visit their website, create a profile and plug in a bunch of evidential data. You are then interviewed by B Corp and selected particpants are subject to a more detailed audit. The result is a comprehensive B Corp GIIR rating report.
Now imagine that this web input form was translated into an XBRL taxonomy. Then any sustainability reporting application could simply generate an XBRL file to supply the data (already collected in the reporting system) to B Corp via a web service. Using XBRL would help to reduce what could be hours of manual input work into a press of a button.
In this scenario, because the underlying data has been ‘standardized’ via an XBRL taxonomy it can then be provided as an RSS feed for analysis by any application capable of consuming the feed. This gets right to the heart of XBRL’s real value proposition: the effective and efficient communication of information – in this case sustainability impact information rather than purely financial information.
Tags: B Corp, Sustainability
