Advancing Automation in Sustainability Reporting with XBRL
An article in Automaatioväylä (that’s the Finnish Society of Automation’s magazine) highlights significant challenges and opportunities in automating sustainability reporting, with a strong focus on the potential of XBRL to address these issues. The adoption of the EU’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) will require listed and large companies to report on sustainability matters in greater detail, with better controls using Inline XBRL to ensure comparability and transparency.
As the new CEO of XBRL Europe, Elina Koskentalo, points out in the piece, XBRL’s structured approach provides a consistent way to present sustainability data, enabling easier processing and benchmarking. The European Sustainability Reporting Standards (ESRS) aim to enhance comparability by standardising metrics and disclosures, reinforcing the role of XBRL in streamlining data sharing. However, many businesses face hurdles due to fragmented data spread across internal systems and supply chains, complicating automation efforts.
The article emphasises the importance of structured product-level data, such as lifecycle emissions, to empower better decision-making across value chains and a whole of enterprise set of decisions around the automation, capture and integration of a wide range of information for these disclosures. With the first structured CSRD-aligned reports expected as early as 2026, businesses must act now to prepare for this transformative shift. The integration of XBRL standards into sustainability reporting represents a critical step towards greater efficiency and accountability in corporate transparency.
Read the full article here (in Finnish, but it seems to browser-translate perfectly).
