Abstract
In the last twenty years the companies and governments (see the recent directive—2014/95/EU) paid increasing attention to sustainability issues: they gained strategic relevance for the business and deserved interest of stakeholders. According to these sustainability information needs, academics and practitioners examined the development of new accounting information systems (AISs), aimed to collect, elaborate and integrate environmental and social data. In this paper, we consider the Sustainability Balanced Scorecard (SBSC), considering it as an urge to develop and integrate the AISs. The aim of this paper, through a case study, is to investigate the role of SBSC and try to highlight a relationship between the different designs of SBSC proposed by literature and different levels of integration of AISs. This work provides a theoretical contribution to the debate on accounting information system for sustainability and offers useful reflections for the practitioners about the potentialities and critical aspects of SBSC.
1 Introduction
In the last two decades, the companies paid increasing attention to environmental and social issues and now they have gained strategic relevance for the business [1– 3]. They represent risks and opportunities that can affect the financial results, it need only consider their positive or negative effects on corporate reputation [4, 5].
6 Conclusion
The main purpose of this study was to advance understanding of the role of sustainability in the evolution of control and accounting information systems.
To achieve this, the authors examined literature regarding sustainability and accounting information systems, focusing on the contributes regarding: (1) the role of SBSC as a tool for formulating, controlling and communicate the sustainability strategy; (2) the role of the new accounting information systems to support the sustainable commitment of business; (3) the possible relationship between AISs (especially in terms of their integration) and SBSC (which reflects the strategic relevance of sustainability aspects).
