The EU’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) is a pressing requirement for most businesses, and will affect many from 2024. In fact, the largest organisations are already preparing to gather data from 1 January.
Whether it’s CSRD or other ESG disclosures, the prospect can seem overwhelming. In comparison, financial reporting appears simple, because it falls to a single corporate function and is now mostly integral to business processes. Sustainability, on the other hand, touches all aspects of a company’s activities – HR, operations, finance, risk and more – even if specific roles have been established to handle the job of reporting itself. With 250 pages of European Sustainability Reporting Standards (ESRS) and over 1,000 data points, even making sense of them requires time and expertise, and businesses are rightly confused about what they need to do, or where to start.
Our free Quick Scan report offers a high-level assessment of a company’s readiness for CSRD disclosure, as a single percentage, with individual scores across ten core environmental, social and governance topics. It also rates readiness for the cross-cutting ESRS, on double materiality and mandatory disclosures.
These scores are invaluable for identifying the organisation’s strengths and weaknesses, highlighting where further work will be required. Each topic includes background explanations and tailored recommendations, to help you understand the regulations and suitable actions. In addition, a visual ‘traffic light’ summary shows the maturity of common business activities – processes, controls, technology, resources and data – for gathering ESG metrics.
The report identifies areas for improvement (or celebration), to help you structure and prioritise the necessary further action. Importantly, too, it can raise awareness throughout the business, by providing a focus for discussion, common purpose and collaboration across functions. As such, it can help kick-start the organisation’s holistic ESG reporting journey.
The report is based on a wide-ranging questionnaire, which you can complete by yourself, or with Deloitte support. For someone already familiar with the organisation’s sustainability capabilities, completion could take as little as one hour. On the other hand, it might be the first step toward developing those capabilities. Even the process of reaching out internally, to ask about the availability of specific data, for instance, is the start of more widespread collaboration across the organisation, which is essential for effective sustainability reporting.
The Quick Scan tool isn’t intended to be a detailed assessment of CSRD compliance (which could take a month or more to achieve); instead, it provides a quick, high-level view of how ready your organisation is for disclosure, and offers a starting point for raising awareness, identifying priorities and outlining plans.
To discuss the Quick Scan tool in more detail, or to set an appointment to complete the questionnaire, contact Ivan Kukhnin or Wim Bartels. Meanwhile, our CSRD series give an initial overview of CSRD requirements – and should you need more detailed gap assessments, advice on compliance, or support to develop the right line-by-line action plan for your business, our expert Sustainability team is ready to guide and support you.