Sustainability Accounting: How Microsoft Dynamics customers can start the journey

Over the centuries, accountants have always focused on the economic or financial sphere of a company.

Side effects resulting from economic activities, often referred to as ‘externalities’, were regularly ignored. Externalities presented a challenge because they often had no price attached or could not easily be measured in a way that allowed for including them in financial accounting systems.

Ignoring those externalities was well accepted in a world that focused primarily on economic growth and the wealth of nations. But with a rising global population, side effects of economic productivity such as global climate change can no longer be ignored because the number of people and corporations affected by them has dramatically increased over the last years.

A well-known example of those climate change effects is the drought in summer 2018, which forced the German chemical giant BASF to reduce productionbecause of low water levels at the Rhine river. Other economic damage comes in the form of disruption caused by crises like climate-triggered migration

The Allianz risk barometer 2020supports this view and lists the effects of climate change as one of the major business risks. Slowly but surely the focus has shifted from a focus on the wealth of nations to a focus on the survival of nations on an increasingly devastated planet.

What is sustainability accounting?

An important consideration in this respect was made in 2004 by HRH The Prince of Wales, who questioned whether the ‘traditional’ accounting tools are still appropriateto meet the new challenges and risks of the 21st century.

Against the background of traditional accounting tools, let us now have a look at the differences in sustainability accounting. The following graphic illustrates the high-level concept.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sustainability_accounting

On first examination, the graphics might remind one of the Balanced Scorecard concept that was introduced in the early 1990s. But the Balanced Scorecard falls short when it comes to incorporating environmental and social aspects that arise primarily outside of a company.

....Read More