The dirty secret of sustainability reporting is this: most of the work is manual reconciliation in spreadsheets, followed by a frantic conversion to XBRL at the end. The data lives in ten places, someone copies it into a giant Excel, reconciles by hand, and prays the auditor doesn't find the discrepancies first.
The path of a raw datapoint — an invoice, an IoT reading, an ERP record — to an auditable disclosure ready to file should be a pipeline, not a project that starts from scratch every year.
How it works, without magic: ingest the data where it already lives; categorisation that never double-counts (each number enters once); an auditable, versioned factor library (so you know which factor you applied and when); multi-source validation that reconciles ERP, invoices and readings before the auditor does it for you; and native XBRL at the end. Every number carries its source, the transformation, the approver and the timestamp. When the auditor asks "where did this come from?", the answer is one click, not archaeology.
And there's a new reason this matters. With Omnibus, the regulatory obligation shrank — but the demand for data didn't. It changed sender: now it comes from your clients, the banks, the value chain, each in its own format and on its own calendar. If your data only exists for an annual filing, you rebuild it for every request. If it lives in a pipeline, you answer any request with a query.
The honest caveat: the tool doesn't make the materiality calls for you. It doesn't tell you what's material to your business — that's yours, and rightly so. What it does is make the data trustworthy enough that you decide on facts, not on estimates reconciled in a hurry.