Disclosures

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A disclosure is a report that includes responses to questions from one or more sustainability frameworks. You can export the disclosure and include it in a sustainability report, such as your annual report, corporate social responsibility report, or a regulatory filing.

In Sustainability Reporting Manager, you select one or more frameworks as the basis of the disclosures. The disclosure is populated with questions from the frameworks.

Questions from managed frameworks include guidance about where you can obtain data for the response. Where Envizi Guidance is provided, it is a collection of best practices to keep in mind when responding to the question. For example, it might highlight a cross-over in regulatory filing.

For questions that require a quantitative response, the data might be available from another module, such as a PowerReports, in IBM® ESG Suite. The guidance typically helps you find and extract that information.

In the methodology section of a response, you can describe the process by which your organization responds to a question. In the following years, the methodology serves as a reminder to the assignee of the process.

You can record your quantitative or qualitative data, methodology, and attachments in the response. If your organization published relevant documentation online, you might add a link to the documentation. If your organization has existing policy documents, you might attach the document directly to the disclosure.

Each framework separates questions into topics. Topics categorize questions into themes based on the framework. A category is a classification that is applied by Envizi ESG Suite to further classify questions. In your organization, you might have experts in different aspects of sustainability, for example, emissions, social concerns, human rights. If you enable categorizations, you can classify the questions into broader themes across frameworks. You can assign experts to the questions to their areas of expertise.

Disclosure roles

Note: In Sustainability Reporting Manager, the term role refers to the responsibility that a person performs when working on a question in a disclosure and is separate from the term work role, which refers to a specialized function that an administrator assigns to users of Envizi ESG Suite.

Each disclosure has the following roles that are associated with it:

Assignee: A person who is responsible for responding to a question. The assignee typically gathers information and completes responses by entering data in the relevant fields, adding links, and adding attachments.; A default assignee is automatically added to each question. You can reassign a question to someone else.; When the assignee completes a response for a question, the assignee sets the response to Ready for Review.
Contributor: A person who helps the assignee create the response. The assignee nominates the contributors. A contributor can also have another roles. A contributor cannot change the status of a response to Ready for Review. Adding a contributor to a response is optional.
Reviewer: A person who is responsible for reviewing the response. After the reviewer validates the response, the reviewer sets the response to Ready for Approval, if an approver is assigned to the disclosure. Otherwise, the reviewer sets the status to Complete.
Approver: A person who is responsible for approving the response. When the response is approved, the approver can mark the response as complete. Assigning an approver to a response is optional.
Disclosure owner: The person who is responsible for the disclosure content. The owner can also have the role of assignee, reviewer, or approver but they do not have the same restrictions that are associated with these roles.

In Sustainability Reporting Manager, you can assign questions to team members based on their area of expertise. For sensitive questions, you can control who can see responses. Each person who is assigned a role in a disclosure has access to the subset of questions that apply to them only.

Disclosure dates

Each disclosure has four key dates that are associated with it:

Ready for review date: The assignees must provide their responses by this date. Each response must be set to at least Ready for Review by this date.
Ready for approval date: The reviewers must complete their review by this date. Each response must be set to Ready for Approval by this date.; The date is available if an approver is assigned to a response in the disclosure.
Complete by date: The reviewer or approver must complete their reviews and approval by this date. Each response must be set to Complete by this date.
Disclosure due date: The disclosure owner verifies that the disclosure is complete by this date. The date is set for information purposes only.

Disclosure workflow

The owner of a disclosure also sets a ready for review date, which is the date when all responses must be ready for review. The owner also sets the disclosure complete by date, which is when the entire disclosure is due for completion. A burndown chart shows progress toward the completion date. A disclosure due by date can be set but is only for information purposes.

The diagram in Figure 1 shows the states that each question in a disclosure passes through.

A screenshot of the workflow of a disclosure. — Figure 1. Workflow

To do: The question is added to the disclosure but no response is provided.
In progress: The assignee saved a draft of a response in the response field.
Ready for review: The assignee completed the response and tagged the question as ready for review.
Ready for approval: The assignee completed the response and tagged the question as ready for the approver to assess.
Complete: The reviewer or approver completed the review of the response and decided that it meets the organization needs.

You can revert the status of a question at any stage. A question in a disclosure can be moved to the next stage by the appropriate role. For example, if a question is in ready for review status, a reviewer can move the disclosure to the ready for approval status. You can skip a stage when moving backwards but not forwards.