Unifying ESG & Financial Reporting

Section 1

Introduction

Sustainability reporting is no longer just about meeting stakeholder expectations. Increasingly, it’s about enabling better business decisions. Organizations today must navigate evolving disclosure requirements, assurance expectations, and growing investor scrutiny — and in response, chief financial officers (CFOs) are being called upon to bring greater discipline, governance, and accountability to sustainability data.

The challenge is clear: sustainability information often resides across disconnected systems, processes, and teams. As a result, Finance leaders are playing a central role in establishing trusted data foundations, strengthening controls, and integrating sustainability and financial reporting. This marks a new imperative for many CFOs — treating sustainability data as a strategic asset that supports compliance, performance management, risk mitigation, and long-term value creation.

Now more than ever, a visible link exists between how an organization conducts business and how it performs. According to Accenture’s Destination Net Zero 2025 report, “Today, nearly nine out of ten (89%) of the world’s largest companies are connecting their decarbonization efforts to business value. They’re not just talking about decarbonization: they’re showing how cutting emissions drives performance and growth.” That performance and growth drives investment: a 2025 PwC Global Investor Survey found that 78% of investors say sustainability metrics directly improve their interest and confidence to invest in a company.

As sustainability becomes an integral part of business strategy, CFOs must ensure they have a defined plan for capturing trusted data, maintaining governance and control, and measuring the impact of sustainability initiatives on business performance and long-term value creation. According to Accenture, a large majority of CFOs (85%) expect ESG disclosure requirements to increase over the next three years — yet many say their companies aren’t fully prepared. Almost 50% aren’t even capturing the relevant ESG data in an automated way, and while upcoming regulations demand that companies report on climate-related risks and opportunities and seek external assurance on their disclosures, just 22% of CFOs say they are well prepared to do both.

Section 2

Why Align ESG with Financial Reporting?

As sustainability disclosures face greater scrutiny from investors, regulators, and assurance providers, organizations need sustainability data that is as reliable and auditable as financial data. CFOs and Finance teams are uniquely positioned to bring proven financial controls, governance frameworks, and reporting rigor to sustainability reporting — ensuring consistent, accurate, and decision-useful information across the enterprise.

The mandatory ESG reporting requirements on the horizon mean that meeting organizational sustainability objectives will require a management process. Enter the corporate performance management (CPM) process that Finance teams already employ to meet financial objectives. Through this process, Finance engages in goal-setting, planning, monitoring and reporting, and analyzing results to track progress and adjust as needed to stay on track.

As emphasized in Accenture’s Measuring Sustainability. Creating Value. survey report on ESG reporting, “Meeting demands for sustainability data will be integral to company performance. Making a CFO responsible for sustainability is essential for ensuring a company meets its ESG goals. Companies are much more likely to extensively embed ESG in core management processes when the CFO has accountability for ESG metrics.”

Section 3

ESG Reporting Today

According to Bloomberg Intelligence, global ESG and sustainability assets are projected to surpass $40 trillion by 2030 — a figure that accounts for over 25% of total global assets under management. Amid that inflow, stakeholders are increasingly interested in ESG reporting, and in more detailed, more frequent disclosures from public and private enterprises.

As sustainability reporting continues to evolve, organizations face increasing expectations for transparent, reliable, and decision-useful disclosures, and regulatory frameworks are reshaping how companies measure, manage, and report sustainability performance. Examples include:

• The EU Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD)
• Climate disclosure requirements in Australia
• The UK Sustainability Disclosure Requirements (SDR)
• Emerging reporting standards across markets — including Japan and China — aligned with the International Sustainability Standards Board (ISSB)

At the same time, investors, customers, lenders, employees, and regulators are demanding greater visibility into how organizations manage sustainability-related risks and opportunities. Sustainability data is becoming increasingly important to corporate reporting, risk management, strategic planning, and capital allocation — driving organizations to establish stronger governance, controls, and accountability over sustainability information. For many companies, the focus has shifted beyond compliance alone to an integrated approach that connects sustainability performance with financial results, business strategy, and long-term value creation. As with any new data collection or management process, spreadsheets and email are the initial tools of choice — but because control and accuracy are required for ESG reporting, organizations run into the same challenges they faced when those tools were used for financial reporting.

Section 4

Current Challenges

Spreadsheets and email offer wide accessibility, easy usability, and low cost — but where control and accuracy matter, this approach to ESG reporting quickly suffers from the same shortcomings found when the tools are used for financial reporting. Four problems come up again and again.

The GHG Protocol’s three emissions scopes

Investors increasingly evaluate sustainability through the lens of business performance and long-term value creation. Organizations that effectively manage sustainability-related risks and opportunities are often viewed as better positioned across five critical sustainability value drivers identified by PwC — alongside understanding value at risk — that influence investment decisions and corporate performance:

The regulatory landscape reinforces the point. When the EU announced its €750 billion Green Deal in 2021, it came with reporting requirements for larger EU and non-EU companies and an EU taxonomy directing funding toward “green” assets over old (“grey”) technology; the European Commission tasked the European Financial Reporting Advisory Group (EFRAG) with implementing the CSRD and the underlying European Sustainability Reporting Standards (ESRS). The EU has since responded to concerns about complexity through the Omnibus simplification package, which raises reporting thresholds, reduces administrative burden, and extends timelines for certain organizations — but the direction remains clear. In the US, the SEC has paused its initial proposed reporting regulations, though states including California, New York, and Connecticut have implemented their own climate disclosure requirements; and Brazil, China, Japan, the UK, and South Africa have implemented or are implementing requirements of their own. Today, approximately 50% of global GDP is under some type of ESG reporting requirement.

The release of IFRS S1 and IFRS S2 by the ISSB marked a significant milestone in the evolution of sustainability reporting; these standards increasingly serve as the foundation for sustainability-related financial disclosures globally, giving organizations a common framework for reporting sustainability and climate-related risks and opportunities. The main driver for creating the ISSB, at COP26, was the lack of clear standards for ESG data — data that is generally hard to audit and doesn’t align with financial statements, making it extremely hard for investors and other stakeholders to determine true risk exposure. For CFOs, this convergence represents an important step toward integrating sustainability and financial reporting on a single, trusted data foundation.

That integration needs to evolve, and quickly. The number of data sources is far greater for ESG reporting than for financial reporting, because ESG spans health and safety, labor conditions, fuel usage, property management, waste management, and more. Despite technology improvements, most large organizations still pull this data from a multitude of operational systems, which makes collection especially challenging — and is exactly why more organizations are looking to extend the financial close, consolidation, and reporting capabilities of their existing CPM platforms to handle ESG reporting. Provided the platform has the required features, that’s a viable way to align ESG reporting with financial consolidation and reporting. Those features should include:

• Collection of financial and non-financial data from a variety of internal and external systems
• Support for forms-based data entry of ESG metrics
• Up-to-date emission factors for complex emission and unit-of-measure conversion calculations
• Provision and maintenance of multiple ESG reporting frameworks and metrics across industries
• Consolidation of ESG metrics and textual commentary across multiple hierarchies
• Extensive data validations, controls, and audit trails
• The ability to capture ESG targets and goals for comparison against actual results
• A variety of output types — standard reports, interactive dashboards, and Excel-based analysis of ESG metrics

Section 5

Key Considerations

Plenty of standalone ESG/sustainability reporting tools are available in the market. But to align ESG/sustainability reporting with a monthly financial close, consolidation, and reporting process, organizations should look for a platform with five capabilities:

Built-In Data Quality

At its core, a fully integrated CPM platform with built-in financial data quality is critical to effective transformation across Finance and lines of business. A key requirement is 100% visibility from reports to data sources — all financial and operational data must be clearly visible and easily accessible. Organizations collect data from multiple underlying systems and then run multiple calculations and consolidation steps; full transparency gives users and auditors the connections between source data and final reported data, including every transformation, adjustment, and elimination.

The solution should also include guided workflows that protect business users from complexity — guiding them through data management, verification, analysis, certification, and locking. That matters because the biggest ESG reporting challenge is simply the number of data sources to collect from and the sheer volume of requests within an organization; across disparate systems that collection can take days or weeks, while a unified system with guided tasks saves both time and money. Most important is the system’s ability to validate and transform data to ensure complete and accurate ESG information — filling in missing data fields, aligning analysis, and ensuring commonality in data before anything appears on a report, and flagging any value that looks out of place given the company’s parameters (for example, a typo during manual data entry).

Poor ESG metrics can make it difficult to attract valuable investment, as liabilities are considered too high. Today, attracting talent is a major concern for organizations — and that, too, can be affected by ESG metrics, as people become more selective about who they work for and with. More than ever, organizations should avoid reputational damage or expensive legal claims caused by poor ESG data. As global standards converge into a clearer position, organizations must bring ESG reporting together in a unified way.

Robust Reporting

Finally, the capability to create, view, and analyze a variety of reports and views is critically important, and the ability to drill between reports and dashboards means users can quickly and easily get the answers they need at any time. A broad range of reporting and analytics capabilities reduces reliance on spreadsheets and fragmented tools, increasing the speed, scope, and accuracy of reporting across the organization. Processes across the Office of the CFO must be unified and provide self-service, easy-to-use reporting for various stakeholder groups — automating and streamlining ESG and financial reporting while also addressing the requirements of strategic partners in other areas of the organization.

Section 6

Case Study: Accell Group

Accell Group designs simple and smart solutions to create a fantastic cycling experience for everyone who uses Accell bikes. A maker of bicycles, bicycle parts, and accessories, Accell is the European market leader in e-bikes and the second largest in bicycle parts and accessories, with numerous leading European bicycle brands under one roof — including Haibike, Winora, Ghost, Batavus, Koga, Lapierre, Raleigh, Sparta, Babboe, and Carqon.

Facing increasing pressure to report on sustainability performance, Accell Group started a Finance transformation journey to manage the group’s ESG data and financial consolidation all in one software platform. Since 2022, Accell Group has leveraged OneStream for consolidation and lease accounting processes, as well as ESG reporting — a transformation that reflects both the group’s commitment to sustainability and transparency and its recognition of the importance of ESG reporting for stakeholders. One of the main benefits of aligning ESG reporting with financial close processes is the ability to unify data from multiple sources into a single platform, making it easier to track and report on key sustainability metrics (e.g., carbon emissions, energy usage, and employee diversity) and to compare and analyze performance across different business units and locations.

“ESG data was previously collected in Excel® — sometimes by legal entity, sometimes by region — and this collection was done just once a year due to the cumbersome process. It would take a lot of time and a large group of people to complete. Now ESG data is merged with financial data via an ESG dashboard in OneStream.”

Section 7

Business Value

With the rapid move of ESG and sustainability reporting from a voluntary to a mandatory process, CFOs and Finance teams must get engaged to ensure the accuracy and integrity of that reporting to a variety of stakeholders. Aligning ESG reporting with the financial reporting process and system yields several benefits. Here are five of them:

1. Eliminate duplicate data collection, consolidation, and reporting processes. If the same process and system are used for ESG and Finance data, each business unit’s data is collected once and immediately available across processes — effectively one trial-balance load combining financial and ESG/operational data, drastically reducing the integrations and interfaces required.
2. Improve the accuracy and integrity of ESG and sustainability reporting. Effective data collection with strict audit controls, alongside a standard, defined, repeatable reporting process, delivers maximum confidence and reliability — and can shorten overall processes and budgeting cycles, getting critical information to stakeholders faster.
3. Align ESG and sustainability metrics with financial results. Collecting ESG data with the same processes and technology as financial data applies the same rigor, auditability, and traceability to both, and lets users drill down to detail on request — giving stakeholders a trustworthy view of the supporting data.
4. Establish high-quality governance and control over ESG and sustainability metrics. Moving a largely manual, spreadsheet-based process into a system makes a huge difference: validations on load, a defined process with task lists and automation, and fully traceable calculations that give confidence when filing with regulatory bodies.
5. Compare actual ESG and sustainability metrics with goals and targets. A unified platform that combines planning with the actual close and consolidation process eliminates risky integrations, validations, and reconciliations between multiple products and modules, so ESG metrics can be planned and forecasted forward from actuals and compared at any time.

Section 8

Conclusion

Research continues to show that organizations that effectively embed sustainability into their business strategy can outperform peers across a range of financial and operational metrics. As a result, many companies are moving beyond compliance-focused reporting and incorporating sustainability objectives into their corporate strategy, operating models, and performance management processes — giving CFOs and Finance an opportunity to connect sustainability and financial data, enabling better decisions, stronger risk management, and improved long-term outcomes.

A compelling argument now exists to put down the foundational layer for alignment within organizations. While numerous challenges lie ahead for organizations of all sizes, one of the most important decisions will be implementing the right technology solution — one that can align all aspects of reporting and elevate the organization toward its goals. CFOs and Finance teams are well positioned to lead the evolution toward integrated performance management: by extending established financial processes, controls, and reporting disciplines to sustainability information, organizations can create a single source of trusted data that supports compliance, decision-making, risk management, and long-term value creation.

Many ESG reporting solutions in the market today focus on only a specific aspect of ESG, such as environmental, health, and safety (EH&S) compliance — not the broader work of setting ESG goals and targets, tracking progress against them, and modeling the impact of ESG initiatives on future financial results. With a unified CPM platform such as OneStream aligning ESG and financial reporting, all of those processes are handled within a single application and instance.

To learn more, visit OneStream’s ESG webpage, register for the next ESG webinar, or explore the blog posts in the ESG series. If your organization is ready to align ESG reporting with financial reporting and get ahead of upcoming disclosure mandates, request a demo with OneStream today to get started.