There are a variety of tools contained with the Sustainability Reporting Manager that will help you manage your workflow, as you engage with your ESG reporting.

Due Dates

There are three key dates to specify in your Disclosure.

The first is the Ready for Review by date. This is the date when all the various assignees for questions should have given their responses the status Ready for Review.

The second is the Complete by date. This is the date when all responses should have been assessed by a Reviewer, and marked with the status Complete.

The final is the Disclosure Due by date. This is informational; it doesn’t interact with the Sustainability Reporting Manager, but instead gives users an idea of when the final product is due for their organization.

Role Assignments

Each question has two people assigned to it, an Assignee and a Reviewer. While the Assignee collects the majority of the information for the question, the Reviewer ensures that the information collected reflects the needs of the organization.

This helps workflow in a variety of ways. Sustainability teams can assign questions so that each member of their team can answer questions relating to their specialty. Furthermore, the fact that each question has to be reviewed ensures the quality of each response in the final Disclosure.

Question Statuses

There are a variety of statuses that each question goes through, before it is ready for inclusion in your organization’s final product. These include:

To Do: The question has been added to a Disclosure, but the Assignee hasn’t yet had the chance to work on it.

In Progress: The Assignee has started to formulate the response, but isn’t quite finished with it. This status is applied automatically once content has been saved in a response field.

Ready for Review: The Assignee has a full response completed, and is ready for a reviewer to assess the response.

Complete: The Reviewer has looked through the Assignee’s work, and decided that it meets the needs of the organization.

Question statuses are reversible. If, for example, an assignee has a question marked as Ready for Review, but the reviewer decides there’s a few missing pieces to a question, they can change it back to In Progress, and let the assignee know that changes are required.

Burndown Chart

Organizations can view the change in questions statuses within a Disclosure in a burn down chart. As the statuses of questions change over time, this chart will reflect the mix of questions at certain points in time, up to the present day.