G3Reporting
made legible

FIELD GUIDE

Your first sustainability report: start with the evidence

Begin with what your organization does, who its activities affect, and which evidence you can stand behind. A document outline comes later.

G3 reporting desk · Updated 27 October 2026Sources & editorial approach

Give the project a boundary

Write a one-page brief before collecting numbers. Name the reporting organization, the period, the operations being considered and the person responsible for each decision. Separate the organizational boundary from the wider chain of business relationships: a supplier can be relevant to an impact even when it is outside the entities included in a financial statement.

Keep a decision log. A sentence such as “we excluded this site because its acquisition closed after the reporting period” is more useful than an unexplained blank cell. Record the reason, date, decision-maker and evidence needed to revisit it.

Work in four passes

  1. Understand the context. List activities, locations, business relationships and people who may be affected. Ask operational colleagues to challenge what is missing.
  2. Identify impacts. Write down the change experienced by people, the environment or the economy. Avoid substituting a department name or a fashionable label for an impact.
  3. Build an evidence trail. For every proposed disclosure, record its owner, source, period, boundary and limitations. Keep estimates distinguishable from measurements.
  4. Assemble and review. Connect claims to evidence and to their place in the report. Review inconsistencies before polishing the wording.

This is our practical preparation sequence. For a formal GRI claim, use the relevant current Standards and their requirements.

A useful first meeting

Bring one actual operational record, one stakeholder concern and one unresolved boundary decision. For example, a facilities team might bring an electricity invoice while procurement raises the treatment of leased warehouses. Resolve the reporting period and unit before debating the chart style.

End with named actions: who will obtain the missing meter reading, who will document the estimate and who will review the boundary. “Improve sustainability data” is not an actionable assignment.

Build something you can update

Use a compact register rather than a folder of unconnected drafts. Keep the original source, calculation and published statement linked. If a calculation changes, record the previous version and the reason for the change. Start the next period from that register, not from a copied paragraph.

The reporting-plan tool turns this sequence into a printable worklist. The content-index builder helps connect the final disclosures to their evidence and location.