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 IBM® Envizi ESG Suite guidance is provided, it is a collection of best practices to keep in mind when you respond 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 Envizi 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 name

The disclosure name is an identifier for your report. The name should be descriptive enough to easily distinguish it from other disclosures. This name is used throughout the Sustainability Reporting Manager to reference your specific disclosure.

Reporting period

The reporting period defines the time frame that your disclosure covers. This can be a calendar year or a specific reporting year that your organization uses, or a shorter time frame if that applies. This is defined by the Reporting Period End Month and Reporting Period Length in months.

Note: An end month of December 2024 and length of 12 months means that the disclosure’s reporting period is from 1 January 2024 to 31 December 2024.

The reporting period is crucial for ensuring that all data and responses within the disclosure are relevant to the same time frame, and provides consistency and clarity in your sustainability reporting.

Reporting boundary

The Reporting boundary specifies the scope of the data included in your disclosure. You can use this property to restrict access to certain parts of your report based on organizational hierarchy.

By default, the reporting boundary covers the entire organization, allowing any user to be assigned to any disclosure role and participate in its preparation. This property can be changed using the Restrict reporting boundary checkbox.

When the reporting boundary is restricted, it limits who can be assigned to the disclosure. If restricted at the Organization level, only organization-level users can be assigned to view and participate in the report preparation. If restricted to a specific Group in the organization, only users who can access that group can be assigned disclosure roles to view and participate.

Setting a clear reporting boundary helps ensure that the data is accurate and relevant to the defined scope, and also means that you to control who has access to sensitive information in the disclosure.

Disclosure status

The disclosure status controls the visibility of a disclosure during its life cycle. All disclosures start in Draft status by default. In Draft, the disclosure is only visible to administrators and is used for setup, such as adding or removing questions, updating assignments, and configuring properties. Participants cannot view or interact with the disclosure in this status. When the disclosure is ready, changing its status to Active makes it visible to assigned users. In Active status, email notifications can be enabled or disabled. You can also manually notify participants by selecting Notify Users from the Actions menu once it is active.

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:

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.
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.
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.
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.

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: The reviewer or approver must complete their reviews and approval by this date. Each response must be set to Complete by this date.
Disclosure submission date: The disclosure owner verifies that the disclosure is complete by this date. The date is set for information purposes only.