Every quarter, the finance manager at a multi-campus school group sends the same three emails. One goes to Facilities, asking for electricity and water usage. One goes to HR, asking for staff diversity figures. One goes to Academic Affairs, asking for scholarship and community service hours. Then she waits, chases, reformats the replies and pastes everything into an Excel master file.
Fortunately, the report finishes on time. Then life gets harder the moment the auditor asks where exactly the 50,000 kWh for the Bangkok campus came from. The honest answer is “from an email that Facilities sent probably in March”.
Finance teams did not ask to own ESG reporting. But because they know how to produce numbers that stand up to scrutiny, it increasingly lands on their desk.
Key takeaways
- Regulators across Southeast Asia and international school accreditors are asking for stricter environmental and social disclosures, often from finance teams that have never tracked this data.
- Standard accounting systems handle currency, not kilowatt-hours, cubic metres or diversity ratios, so ESG data ends up in emails and spreadsheets.
- ESG reporting for schools works best when data tied to transactions sits in the ledger, while other non-financial data sits in a central data repository.
- Infor SunSystems Cloud, the Infor Data Lake and Infor EPM together turn ESG reporting into a continuous, auditable process.
Why is ESG reporting landing on the finance team?
As regulatory bodies across Southeast Asia and international school accreditors enforce stricter environmental and social disclosures, someone has to produce the numbers. More often than not, that someone is finance.
There is a logic to it. Finance already runs the organisation’s most controlled reporting process. It understands periods, consolidation, sign-off and audit. The challenge is that finance is being asked to report on data it has never systematically tracked, using the same tools, while keeping the same level of accuracy.
In other words, the expectation is that ESG figures should be as reliable as financial ones. The tools, in most schools, are not built for that.
Read more: The A to Z of Sustainability Reporting to Reach Your Green Goals
Why do standard finance systems struggle with ESG data?
Standard accounting systems are built around a single data type: currency. ESG reporting, however, needs both financial and non-financial metrics, such as:
- Kilowatt-hours of electricity consumed
- Cubic metres of water used
- Scope 1 and 2 carbon emissions
- Staff diversity ratios
- Student scholarship hours and community service engagement
- And many more
Read more: Accounting & ESG: A Winning Combo
None of these is a currency value, and none has a natural home in a conventional general ledger. So the data is gathered by email, consolidated in Excel and assembled into a report that typically lacks a system-generated audit trail, version control and any way for an auditor to trace a figure back to its source.
Then comes the framework problem. A multi-campus group must align local requirements with group-level frameworks such as ISSB or GRI and calculate intensity metrics like carbon emissions per enrolled student or water consumption per square metre of campus. These metrics combine financial data, student headcount, and physical footprint, exactly the kind of calculation spreadsheets handle poorly.
Which ESG data belongs in the ledger, and which does not?
Not all ESG data belongs in the general ledger, and trying to force it there only adds noise. A practical split looks like this:
| Type of ESG data | Where it lives | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Data tied to a financial transaction | Statistical accounts in the ledger | Electricity usage posted alongside the utility bill |
| Data from other operational systems | Central data repository | HR diversity ratios, community service hours, supply chain governance scores |
In the ledger
Infor SunSystems Cloud extends its Unified Ledger to hold non-financial values in dedicated statistical accounts that share the same analysis dimensions as financial accounts.
When a campus accountant posts a US$10,000 electricity bill to the utility expense account, they post the 50,000 kWh consumed to the utility statistical account at the same time, both tagged with the same campus, building and department. Cost and environmental impact are bound together in one traceable database.
Outside the ledger
Metrics that originate in HR or other operational systems are pushed as standard messages through Infor ION into the Infor Data Lake, a secure repository for structured and unstructured data. This breaks down departmental silos without flooding the core financial system with non-financial data.
Capturing the data, however, is only half the job. A financial management solution like Infor SunSystems Cloud is the system of record. It posts transactions, applies controls and holds the ledger, including the statistical accounts described above. It is not designed to model data from several sources at once or turn everything into a visualised group-level dashboard for the board.
That is the role of an enterprise performance management (EPM) solution. Rather than replacing the ledger, an EPM platform such as Infor EPM sits on top of it. For ESG reporting, this division of labour matters, because the hardest part is not collecting kilowatt-hours. It is turning them into intensity metrics that can be compared fairly across campuses, entities and years.
How does Infor EPM turn ESG data into board-ready reporting?
Once the data is captured, Infor EPM It pulls data from various sources, like SunSystems Cloud ledger and the Infor Data Lake, then applies multidimensional modelling to calculate the intensity ratios required by frameworks such as GRI and ISSB. For example, greenhouse gas emissions per square metre of campus or energy cost per enrolled student. It also handles multi-currency consolidation across the group and produces dynamic, board-ready ESG dashboards.
Read more: How SunSystems Data Drives Accurate, Meaningful Budgets in Infor EPM
It makes data meaningful for decision-makers, and the results go beyond compliance:
- The email-driven collection cycle disappears.
- Auditors can drill down from the final ESG report in Infor EPM to the statistical ledger entry in SunSystems and on to the source invoice.
- Management can connect impact with performance, for example, checking whether a new campus in Ho Chi Minh City really has lower utility costs per student than an older campus in Bangkok.
- The architecture scales as new carbon pricing regimes or mandatory disclosure rules arrive, without rebuilding the underlying infrastructure.
For TRG International, we believe that schools do not need to solve ESG reporting in one leap. The easiest place to start is with data that already arrives on an invoice. Every utility bill includes both a quantity and a cost. Building the habit of posting both, with the same dimensions, gives the group a reliable environmental dataset within a single reporting cycle.
From there, assign a clear owner for each non-financial metric that comes from outside finance, and connect those systems to the data repository one at a time. The goal is not a perfect ESG report next quarter. It is a process that becomes more complete and more auditable every quarter after that.
Want to see how ESG data can flow from campus invoices to board dashboards? Talk to TRG’s specialists today!
Not ready for a demo yet? Download “Solving 5 Core Finance Challenges in Education with Automation & Cloud Solutions” for the full ESG architecture and four other finance challenges facing school groups.
FAQs
Why is ESG reporting difficult for schools? It requires non-financial data, such as energy use and diversity ratios, that standard accounting systems were not built to store, so it usually ends up in endless email chains or spreadsheets without an audit trail.
Can ESG data be stored in the finance system? Data tied to transactions, such as utility usage, can be held in statistical accounts alongside the related cost. Other metrics are better kept in a central data repository.
Which frameworks do school groups report against? Many align with group-level frameworks such as ISSB or GRI, alongside local regulatory and accreditation requirements.
