EFRAG reports on its Voluntary Standard event
EFRAG has published a summary report of the event it held with the European Commission in Brussels on 9 October on the new Voluntary Standard (VS) for sustainability reporting. More than 1,500 people registered.
The VS entered EU law in September and replaces the earlier VSME recommendation for smaller companies. Any company with up to 1,000 employees can use it. It also acts as a cap: larger companies reporting under the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) cannot ask these smaller companies in their value chain for more data than the VS covers.
The event covered what has changed since the VSME, how the value chain cap works, why there is no assurance requirement, and the Digital Template. EFRAG will publish a major new release of the VS in November, updating the template to reflect changes in the VS Delegated Act, as well as incorporating additional features.
The template matters because a very large number of companies fall under the size threshold, and their banks and customers need usable data for their own reporting. Completed templates can be converted to Inline XBRL using EFRAG’s taxonomy and open-source converter. A small company can fill in one template and send the same machine-readable report to every lender or customer who asks. That saves effort on both sides, and the data that arrives is more reliable. Software companies can add value to the process by integrating data extraction and aggregation and enhanced workflow to create the same Inline XBRL reports.
The summary report and a recording of the event are available here.
