Sustainable Accounting For Company Level: Theoretical Framework

Abstract

There are numerous literature sources that examine environmental management accounting (EMA) system and it seems that all of them agree that EMA improves the quality of the information used for internal decision making in a company as well as for external reporting. In EMA literature and case studies, the authors mainly focus on measuring environmental performance, but apparently "forget" to mention (or mention briefly) about its ability to capture and measure some social performance as well. On the other hand, there is neither social management accounting nor sustainable management accounting was developed and/or adopted in the literature till now. This paper aims to contribute to the ongoing effort of developing corporate sustainability accounting through suggesting theoretical model. The model will be able to generate monetary measures for the three dimensions of corporate sustainability through existed EMA. These measures will be used to support both internal and external decision-makers. Suggested model will mainly target to monetize the measures of social and environmental impacts generated by companies' activities and reported in non-monetary units at their sustainability and/or environmental reports.