Maintain Sustainability Ledger As the Source of Truth for Statutory Reporting
Corporate sustainability reporting is becoming mandatory for organizations around the world. With many regulations requiring sustainability reports to be audited with the same level of rigor as financial auditing, most companies find it difficult to maintain and report sustainability data by defined periods of calendar. It is also difficult to maintain this data in a manner that is auditable and scalable. Oracle Sustainability helps address this challenge by letting you define one or more sustainability ledgers that help to accurately capture and report sustainability data periodically.
A sustainability ledger acts as the source of truth for your sustainability reporting. It contains sustainability activities that have been validated and posted. A sustainability ledger is not a financial ledger and does not touch your company's financials, but it mirrors some of the capabilities of a financial ledger and provides a level of rigor that auditors require.
A sustainability ledger uses an accounting calendar that is set up in Oracle Fusion Cloud Financials. A first period is associated with the ledger that indicates from when the ledger is operational. You have the flexibility to define one or more sustainability ledgers. Each Legal Entity is assigned to one ledger, and a ledger can have multiple Legal Entities. A sustainability ledger supports a period close process where two period statuses, Open and Closed, are supported. After a sustainability ledger is set up, you can retrieve future periods using the Sustainability Periods page. Future periods are retrieved from the accounting calendar starting from the first period you specified on the ledger. All retrieved periods are in Open status by default.
Sustainability Periods Page with Retrieved Periods
The future periods that you retrieve from the accounting calendar are your sustainability periods, and you can manage their statuses within Oracle Sustainability. The activity date of a Draft activity determines the period in which the activity will be accounted. If the activity date falls in a period that is in a Closed status, then the next open period will be defaulted on the activity
An analyst can post activity records to the ledger when a period is open. The application validates a record before posting it. After a record is posted, you cannot update or delete it. You can cancel a posted record and post a replacement as long as the period is open, but the original record remains in the ledger for traceability. When you confirm that all activities expected for a period have been posted, you can close the period.
To expedite the period close process, run the Process Sustainability Activities scheduled process to validate and post activities in bulk.
Steps to Enable
Ensure that you have set up a sustainability ledger as described in the What's new for Update 24D: Set Up Data for Oracle Fusion Cloud Sustainability.
Tips And Considerations
- You can reuse an accounting calendar you have used in Oracle Financials and associate it with a sustainability ledger. This will ensure that periods in sustainability transactions and financial transactions are aligned, which facilitates the reporting process. You can also opt to use a different calendar for the purpose of sustainability reporting.
- You can assign one or more legal entities to a sustainability ledger, but a legal entity can be assigned to only one sustainability ledger.
- All activities must either be in Posted or Canceled status before you can close a sustainability period.
- After you close a sustainability period, you cannot reopen it. In addition, you cannot update, cancel, or delete any activities in that period.
Key Resources
- What's new for Update 24D: Set Up Data for Oracle Fusion Cloud Sustainability
- What's new for Update 24D: Manage Sustainability Activities
Access Requirements
Users who are assigned a configured job role that contains these privileges can access this feature:
- Manage Sustainability Ledger (SUS_MANAGE_LEDGERS_PRIV)
- Manage Sustainability Ledger Period (SUS_MANAGE_LEDGER_PERIODS_PRIV)
- Process Sustainability Activity (SUS_PROCESS_ACTIVITIES_PRIV)
- Post Sustainability Activity to Ledger (SUS_POST_ACTIVITIES_PRIV)