If I had to name the first common mistake I see growing companies make when they tackle ESG reporting, it is foundational: They don’t know if the data they are using is complete and accurate. More than that, they often don’t even know if it is the data they should be using.
For years, ESG reporting was largely voluntary, a way to answer the public’s demand for accountability and show investors you were responsible. But as optional guidelines transition into emerging laws and requirements, the landscape shifts. Investors and regulators no longer want marketing campaigns. They want accurate data provided with assurance.
This brings us to a harsh reality I share with teams newly subject to these regulations: If you are required to file a report in 2027 based on 2026 data, and you wait until 2026 to start preparing, you are already late.
Leaders often assume their existing accounting systems are naturally ready to handle ESG reporting.
They almost never are.
The Illusion of Alignment
I see leadership teams fall into this trap constantly. They look at their organizational chart, see a separate Finance team and a separate ESG team, and assume they are covered.
But in practice, these two teams are working in silos, speaking entirely different languages.
I see this pattern constantly with companies that have been publishing ESG reports voluntarily for a number of years. As they prepare for mandated regulatory reporting, leadership feels secure because their ESG team is getting the exact reports they requested from Finance. But the moment you dig into the architecture and bridge the two teams, the gaps become obvious.
Here is how the breakdown usually happens:
- The Ask: The ESG team needs data to calculate emissions, so they ask Finance for certain reports.
- The Hand-off: Finance, wanting to be helpful, pulls the data and hands it over.
- The Gap: Finance teams are wired to be compliant with accounting standards, but they aren’t trained to understand ESG reporting. ESG teams are great at translating finance data into emissions, but they don’t have the concept of an audit.
Because the ESG team didn’t have an audit background, they didn’t know how to establish completeness and accuracy. They didn’t know how to look for certain accounting transactions that would otherwise be considered emission or non-emissive (i.e., advance or duplicate payments, reversed entries in the vendor reports). They were running calculations on raw data.
The people didn’t fail: the structure simply wasn’t built to translate between the two departments.
The Reality of Retroactive Cleanup
The true operational complexity of ESG reporting reveals itself when you try to force accounting data into sustainability buckets.
Take something as standard as a growing portfolio of leased facilities. From a purely financial perspective, a company might have these perfectly recorded. But you cannot translate that 1:1 to ESG data. For ESG, you have to review the business structure to see who actually holds ‘operational control’ so you can assign those facilities to the proper emissions categories..
When a company’s data architecture isn’t set up for this level of granularity, teams are forced to go back and manually revisit hundreds of outstanding contracts. What should take a minute to encode upfront easily turns into a multi-month project just to find the proper data sources.
When you wait to build the system, you force your teams to look backward instead of forward.
What You Need to Check Today
The fix is actively bridging the technical gap. You need professionals who can translate complex sustainability metrics into an accounting standard, and vice versa.
If you are a CFO or sustainability leader reading this today, before making your next public ESG commitment, take a hard look at your architecture.
Ask yourself these three questions:
- Are my on-book activities scoped properly? Check if all financial transactions have been mapped to the appropriate ESG requirement.
- Are my off-book activities accounted for? Ensure your people management, technology, and operational data are fully captured.
- Are all stakeholders involved? If ESG reporting is falling entirely on your Finance team, or solely on your ESG team without Finance’s oversight, you have a translation gap. Operations, HR, and Tech must understand the why and the how of the data they are providing.
A calm, predictable reporting cycle is designed, never improvised. Build the data architecture a year or two before the regulations hit, and ensure your financial execution naturally supports confident sustainability reporting.
