Firstly, as a company, start reflecting on what sustainability means to you. What role does/could/should sustainability accounting and reporting play within your company’s operations, culture, goals and KPIs. Set some initial broad aspirations for the future, both for your reporting as well as sustainability in general – keep in mind to not only build processes to report but ensure they are geared towards decision enablement.

The first step should be a double materiality assessment to understand your material impacts as well as risks and opportunities your business is facing. This is when you pinpoint what topics are important for you and your stakeholders. It is important here to engage with your stakeholders so that you make sure you are accounting for and reporting on what they deem material. You can use surveys, interviews, or if you are a big company, see what people are saying about you in the press and social media. It is also important to identify where your company has any form of impact, whether positive or negative. Some general reporting topics are required from any company reporting, but you can also choose to report in more detail on how your value chain creates impact in environmental, social or economic realms. For more information on double materiality and what is required for CSRD, follow this link.

After materiality assessment, a company can set its scope for the report and plan how to get the relevant data for everything that fits within this scope. A company could seek to focus mostly on environmental aspects, or could go for a very holistic report covering governance and social elements as well. Your materiality assessment will guide this scope-setting.

This is where Pelt8 comes in. It is now worth thinking about what reporting framework you will work with. One standard & one framework have emerged in Switzerland (and the EU) as key players in this space – The Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) & the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TCFD). The current wording of the Swiss Ordinance on Climate Disclosures ‘requires climate disclosures to be aligned to the recommendations of the TCFD for 2024 in the reporting year 2025. At Pelt8, we help identify interoperability between standards and frameworks to help sustainability professionals optimise time spent on reporting. As it happens, TCFD and GRI are highly interoperable. For these upcoming recommendations we recommend companies to start working from the GRI standards. GRI is the lmost broadly adopted standard out there and is already accepted to report on a company’s impact in Switzerland for 2023 in the reporting year 2024. The EFRAG (EU regulator) and GRI have also made a joint statement of interoperability ensuring that any work that goes into reporting on GRI will set foundations for ESRS (European Sustainability Reporting Standards). Don’t worry though, you don’t have to figure out the intricacies of GRI and worry about all the data points and information you will need to collect. Using our tool, we provide a GRI template so that you know exactly what information you need to find. Then, all you have to do is onboard the users that will help you collect the data. We will train them and provide on-going support to make your data collection process as smooth as possible. As the data is collected it will be matched to the relevant GRI disclosures. Once you are ready to expand to other standards or frameworks you will be able to use the data collected for your GRI reporting to not start from scratch.