How to reportGuiding Principles
The Guiding Principles and the recommendations on What to Report are designed to balance standardization and flexibility. These resources are complementary and should be read together.
Standardization
The “What to Report” recommendations reflect feedback from participants in the public consultation on the report content that could and should be standardized
Flexibility
The Reporting Norms are adaptable to context and flexible to the needs of individual organizations. The Guiding Principles promote consistency in judgment calls made by report preparers
The Guiding Principles are based on the Conceptual Framework for Financial Reporting of the International Accounting Standards Board. The Conceptual Framework calls these the “Qualitative Characteristics of Useful Information”. The Guiding Principles interpret these six qualitative characteristics in the context of impact performance reporting.
The Reporting Norms follow the Conceptual Framework in distinguishing between fundamental and enhancing characteristics:
“The fundamental qualitative characteristics are relevance and faithful representation.
Information must both be relevant and provide a faithful representation of what it purports to represent if it is to be useful. Neither a faithful representation of an irrelevant phenomenon nor an unfaithful representation of a relevant phenomenon helps users make good decisions.
Comparability, verifiability, timeliness, and understandability are qualitative characteristics that enhance the usefulness of information that both is relevant and provides a faithful representation of what it purports to represent. The enhancing qualitative characteristics may also help determine which of two ways should be used to depict a phenomenon if both are considered to provide equally relevant information and an equally faithful representation of that phenomenon.”– IFRS, Conceptual Framework for Financial Reporting, Chapter 2
The guiding principles are adapted from:
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The Reporting Norms can be used for standalone impact reports or integrated reports that combine impact and financial information. The public consultation indicated a growing preference for integrated reporting. A common approach is to prepare impact performance reports annually, with interim updates as needed. The Reporting Norms operate on a “comply-or-explain” basis. Preparers should strive to include the information suggested in "What to Report" or provide the reason why the information is not included. Founding Adopters include a Reporting Norms Index in their impact report (or equivalent document) to support transparency and make reports easier for readers to navigate