How Accountants Help Businesses Ensure Sustainability
Businesses usually don’t prefer short-term wins over following a sustainable strategy. To thrive in your business, you need to adopt the best strategy for long-term success in financial and other business terms. To understand and follow financial strategies for your business growth. Having an accountant on your side or outsourcing accounting services can be beneficial. These financial experts can measure corporate environmental footprint, disclose reports and results, and add credibility to them. While you guess the areas of how accountants help move toward sustainability, let’s get further and read what experts have to say on this topic.
Christian Velitchkov, Co-Founder of Twiz LLC
Accountants are a key part of the business. They handle all the complex numbers for us, and hence, they are crucial for keeping a proper record of our proceedings. However, these accountants can also prove to be sustainable for the business.
These people are the ones managing our cash portfolios, and they can make space for the sustainable development of the firm and society. They can help the businesses in coming up with a way by which they can put aside a provision for sustainable development. Accountants can help with the math to make sure the business doesn’t incur losses or doesn’t compromise with their work quality, along with doing their part for the sustainable development around them. This is also known as sustainable accounting, which happens to be a subpart of the financials.
Luke J Fletcher, Founder of Raw Accounting
Together we face arguably the biggest challenge of our time, how to continue to achieve economic growth while living within our natural barriers. As problem solvers and decision-makers within organizations, accountants have a pivotal role to play. Accountants have always been known for reporting on financial data, but this skill set is increasingly well placed to support organizations to measure and report their environmental impacts. And without accurately measuring what matters, organizations will never be able to track progress.
Accountants and advisors also have a crucial role to play in supporting businesses with adopting more sustainable technology. From identifying available reliefs and grants for green solutions to long-term benefit analysis of adopting green infrastructure to support boards and top-level executives.
Of course, finance generally, including accountants, has a crucial role to play in "greening finance." The British Governments roadmap sets out the desire to make the UK the best place for green and sustainable investment. As consumers begin to take a closer look at where their investments are located, accountants will be called upon to support organizations in being a "responsible steward of capital."
Put simply, if businesses don't adapt, there could be no business left, and accountants are well placed to support organizations to take the radical steps needed to change.
John Russell, Managing Partner at Russell & Co Chartered Accountants
Accountants have a huge role in the effort to drive more sustainable business practices. More often than not, accountants have incredible in-depth knowledge of the businesses they are working with; they know what powers them, what motivates them, how their day-to-day operations run and how these processes can be altered.
Firstly, accountants can accurately identify risks and, in this scenario, risks to a business that climate change poses. There are physical risks, for example, damage to premises caused by flooding or even wildfires, but there are also more devastating transitional risks. As governments the world over move towards a net-zero goal, many supply chain issues will crop up amongst others which will have a significant impact on businesses. By informing business owners of these risks, accountants can actively help a company become more sustainable in their work.
Martin Seeley, Chief Executive Officer at MattressNextDay
Accountants can help organizations move to a more sustainable future by acting as strategic partners. As a business owner, accountants can aid in the improvement of a company's communication with its stakeholders by rethinking how it reports, such as through the use of the integrated reporting IR> framework. This entails concentrating on the most important facts and connecting financial and non-financial data in company reports. Accountants are qualified to independently audit organizations and offer assurance on their sustainability practices. They improve the organization's internal decision-making process and, as a result, its capacity to meet long-term sustainability goals. Lastly, they also can ensure that a company gains benefits from its sustainable practices by improving staff retention, customer happiness, and aligning compensation with sustainability objectives.
Michelle Devani, Founder of lovedevani
Sustainability comes in all sizes, mechanisms, and matters, and as a business owner, I believe accountants can help with this move. Accountants have their shares, especially in financial strategies and models, documentation processes, risk measures, and they're part of the decision-making team. They ensure valuable and transparent information/measures that represent high-quality standards for their respective role and company. We can consider them as our reliable informants and resiliency makers that help drive sustainability in every process.
Alex Wan, Co-Founder at Vinpit
Accountants can assist firms in taking advantage of their sustainable practices by improving staff retention, customer satisfaction, aligning remuneration with sustainability goals, and asking for financing and subsidies to help businesses become more sustainable. Accountants are pretty knowledgeable about the business. They understand what makes a business work at each stage. The goal is for them to use this expertise to drive change in business operations and, more importantly, in areas like the supply chain and to use their skills to measure what's going on. Accountancy and finance professionals may contribute an integrated approach that prioritizes sustainability in organizational decision-making rather than treating it as an afterthought.
Conclusion
Considering the above-shared responses by experts, we can say that accountants play a crucial role in helping business owners unlock the potential of sustainable financial strategies. Following these strategies, they can drive excellent financial decisions but also boost operational quality by investing the right amount in the right place. For example, managing costs by outsourcing tax preparation services and utilizing them for purchasing new, advanced ERP software. There’s a lot an accountant or partner accounting firm can do for your business; you only need to find the right one.
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