Exploring pre-delivered Regulatory Standards

SAP Sustainability Control Tower enables organizations to structure their reporting content around regulatory and voluntary reporting standards such as European Sustainability Reporting Standards (ESRS), International Sustainability Standards Board (ISSB) or Voluntary Sustainability Reporting Standard for SMEs (VSME). SAP-provided metrics are delivered as business content in SAP Sustainability Control Tower that are mapped to important regulatory reporting standards such as ESRS and EU Taxonomy out-of-the box. Metrics can be assigned to multiple reporting standards in parallel, enabling you to establish a single point of truth across different reporting standards and requirements. Additionally, you can extend available reporting standards within SAP Sustainability Control Tower or create entirely new standards based on a unified approach. Moreover, you can also assign custom metrics to one or more reporting standards ensuring interoperability between standards.

In SAP Sustainability Control Tower, reporting standards are defined and structured around a few core dimensions that can be viewed and explored in the Manage Master Data App.

Reporting Standard:

A reporting standard is a voluntary or regulatory reporting framework specifying the structure and content of the information to be disclosed. SAP provides out-of-the-box content for the following reporting standards: Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) – ESRS, CSRD – EU Taxonomy, International Financial Reporting Standard (IFRS) – ISSB (planned).

Version Reporting Standard:

Reporting standards are subject to change. Changes to a reporting standard are represented by versions which are used to indicate from which (changed) version of a reporting standard a specific content item originates.

Sustainability Matter:

A sustainability matter specifies the sustainability topic domain to which a content item belongs. It is a classifier used across reporting standards and includes categories such as Climate Change, Pollution, Water, Circular Economy, Own Workforce.

Disclosure Requirement:

A disclosure requirement is a mandatory reporting item. It defines which topic(s) a company must report on and why (e.g. policies, targets, actions, or impacts related to climate change, workforce, business conduct, etc.). It represents an individual reporting obligation set by the standard.

Data Point:

A data point is a specific piece of information that a company must provide to satisfy a disclosure requirement. You can also understand data points as references to certain regulations that needs to be followed when implementing reporting standards such as ESRS. Data points can be quantitative or qualitative and are the actual "answers" to the disclosure requirement. They are represented by metrics (quantitative/qualitative) in SAP Sustainability Control Tower.

Reporting Scope and Standards Overview

To define the relevant scope of data points and metrics within a reporting standard applicable to your organization you can define a reporting scope. The reporting scope describes both the data points to be reported and the organizational boundary. These are typically derived from the Double Materiality.