For many businesses, sustainability and ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) reporting used to live in scattered spreadsheets or long email threads. With the importance of CSRD (Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive) compliance moving from “sometime in the future” to “it’s happening now,” that ad hoc approach has become risky fast. However, there’s good news for businesses that are already on Dynamics 365 Business Central: Its Business Central sustainability module gives you a way to bring this work into the same system you use to run the rest of your business, ensuring continuity and ease of collaboration.
In this blog, we’ll look at how to approach your Business Central sustainability setup so you can support ESG reporting and CSRD reporting without reinventing your entire data model. The goal isn’t to turn you into a climate scientist; rather, it’s to help you capture the right data, in the right places, so your sustainability management process is repeatable and auditable. We’ll also explore how Business Central sustainability fits with other Microsoft sustainability solutions you may be considering, and where to draw the line between “keep it simple in ERP” and “this should be handled by a specialist tool.” By the end, you should have a clearer picture of what realistic, day-to-day ESG compliance looks like inside Dynamics 365 Business Central.Before you touch a single field in the Business Central sustainability module, it helps to step back and decide what you actually need to track. CSRD compliance and ESG reporting both start with scope, so you need to decide which emissions, operations, and entities are in, and which are out.
In practice, that means looking at how your current data is structured in Dynamics 365 Business Central and where sustainability management can be hooked in without breaking anything. For many organizations, that involves a mix of:
This upfront Business Central sustainability setup work can feel a little abstract, but it allows the system to later produce far more reliable numbers for ESG reporting, climate targets, and internal KPIs.
Once you’ve agreed on scope and structure, you can enable Business Central’s sustainability features and begin configuring actual records. Most teams do better starting with one or two high-quality data streams, e.g., electricity and natural gas, instead of trying to capture everything at once.
As you configure sustainability management in the system, keep an eye on how these records will ultimately support ESG compliance and CSRD compliance. For instance:
From there, you can layer in additional categories, connect to other Microsoft sustainability solutions if needed, and gradually build a more complete Business Central sustainability footprint without overwhelming your finance or operations teams.
Next, you’ll want to think about how this data will actually move into ESG reporting and CSRD reporting outputs. The various sustainability features in Business Central can give you clean, structured numbers, but you still need a clear path from those numbers to the disclosures your auditors and stakeholders expect to see.
For many organizations, that looks like a simple flow, for instance:
The more your sustainability management process feels like a normal part of month-end or quarter-end, the more reliable it will be. That’s where good Business Central sustainability setup pays off. If your teams already know where to enter energy usage, how to tag relevant transactions, and when to review outliers, you’re most of the way to practical ESG compliance.
From there, you can decide whether to keep things within Dynamics 365 Business Central or connect to broader Microsoft sustainability solutions for advanced scenario modeling and target tracking. Either way, the goal is the same: build a CSRD compliance and ESG compliance process that doesn’t live in a separate universe from your core financial and operational data.
On paper, using Business Central for sustainability looks straightforward: You configure the module, load some data, and export numbers for ESG reporting and CSRD reporting. In reality, the hard part is stitching everything together so your chart of accounts, dimensions, approvals, and audit trails – to start – all line up and still work for day-to-day finance.
Here, an experienced Dynamics 365 Business Central partner like IES makes a real difference. A good partner helps you translate regulatory language into practical configuration: which fields to use in the sustainability module, how to structure integrations, and where to set up controls so CSRD compliance and ESG compliance aren’t just “projects,” but ongoing processes.
We’ve worked with organizations at very different levels of maturity, from first-time ESG reporting teams to companies already experimenting with Microsoft sustainability solutions. In each case, the goal is the same: design sustainability management in a way that fits how you already use Business Central, instead of forcing your teams into an entirely new workflow.
If you’re ready to move beyond spreadsheets and build a reliable Business Central sustainability foundation, IES can help you assess your current state, design a roadmap, and implement the pieces step by step.