For the new year, the focus lens should indeed be panned to the fact that accountancy professionals make relevant connections between the environment, people, and finance, as according to the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants, they are undoubtedly champions of driving quality decision-making for sustainable value creation.
The ACCA, in a report, specified some insights for better understanding in making crucial information connections. Among others are connectivity and the profession's role and a call to action.
For the accounting body, the success of an organisation is the result of several factors coming together in the right way at the right time. These factors are interconnected and increasingly incorporate sustainability-related matters, as they carry implications for the organisation’s resources and how they are used.
Without making these interconnections, ACCA says organisations are at risk of not being sufficiently alert to challenges impacting their resilience or are missing opportunities to thrive.
The accountancy and finance profession must proactively play its vital role in identifying, managing and communicating these interconnections – so the organisation’s sustainability-related risks and opportunities are clearly defined and managed with progressed measured.
Helen Brand, chief executive of ACCA, says the accountancy profession is 'well-placed' to interconnect matters of people, planet, and profit.
The International Sustainability Standards Board (ISSB) and some of ACCA’s network of business experts shared their valuable insights to help connect information for quality decision-making and sustainable value creation.
Many of such recommendations call for professionals to leverage core ‘business as usual’ activities – but incorporate sustainability-related insights central to the organisation’s survival.
The necessary changes to these activities can be phased in and require collaboration, creating scope to reduce the burden of effort and cost.
Professionals need to play a crucial role in making connections by:
- creating a common understanding of what connectivity means – so that all can apply the same definition and similarly value it
- learning with other professional accountants and professions – collaboration will be key, as no single profession has complete knowledge across all sustainability-related matters and their relationship to business
- practising integrated thinking – to better understand how a sustainability matter impacts each resource that the organisation relies on, including the relationships between or the processing of these resourcesÂ
- building traceable corporate reporting information flows – so that all appreciate how material sustainability-related matters are managed throughout business activities
- knowing where to combine sustainability-related information production with that of finance – to reduce cost and effort, maximise relevant insight, and lessen the risk of unintentional greenwashing
- applying an agile and adaptable process to produce information – because new connections for sustainable value will continually arise, especially as policy in this area continues to evolve
- engaging with and influencing the development of practical, connected sustainability-related regulation, reporting, assurance and ethical requirements – to better enable the intended outcome: the necessary connectivity for sustainable value creation with integrity.
