Sedoha

The field

What is impact accounting?

Books for the value an organization creates and destroys beyond money: the discipline of double-entryEvery value is recorded twice, once as where it came from and once as where it went, so the books check themselves. accounting, extended to all six capitals.

Money has books. Impact doesn’t.

For five hundred years, organizations have kept books for one of the six capitals they run on. The other five — human, social, natural, intellectual, manufactured — carry real value but sit off the books: hard to compare, hard to manage, easy to ignore.

A real field has formed to fix that

Impact accounting prices outcomes — a tonne of carbon, a workplace injury, a year of schooling — and books them like money. It is a young field with serious institutions: some 100,000 published value factorsPublished prices for outcomes: what a tonne of carbon or a workplace injury costs society, in currency. governed through public due process under the Capitals Coalition, and the six-capitals framework in the custody of the IFRS Foundation. Pioneers keep real accounts: Kering’s environmental P&L is in its second decade, and Forico’s natural-capital balance sheet carries Big Four limited assuranceAn outside auditor’s check (“nothing came to our attention”), the level available for impact figures today.. Some eighty organizations worldwide have published impact accounts.

But it runs on spreadsheets

Nearly every set of impact accounts is a bespoke project: consultants, spreadsheets, months. The cost doesn’t fall with practice. The accounts are yearly snapshots, not running books. No two organizations’ are comparable. That is why few executives, or consultants, have ever encountered the field. If you’re reading this to orient yourself, you’re in the majority, not behind.

Overview of the field

IVSB and IFVI are focused on impact valuation; ISSB, EFRAG and GRI on disclosure; GIIN is setting the standard for impact investing; and IAASB is concentrating on the auditing of impact accounting. What the field still lacks is accounting software and practitioner accounting firms. Sedoha exists to fill that gap.

The standard-setters: who decides what impact is worth

  • IVSB (Impact Value Standards Board): the central standards body for impact valuation, formed in late 2025 when IFVI merged into the Capitals Coalition.
  • IFVI (International Foundation for Valuing Impacts): publishes the valuation methodologies (greenhouse gases, water, waste, workplace safety, wages) and the Global Value Factor Database of roughly 100,000 monetization factors. The brand and methodology library continue under IVSB’s oversight.
  • Capitals Coalition: the parent organization now hosting IVSB, and the network championing the six-capitals approach. About 350 affiliated organizations.
  • VBA (Value Balancing Alliance): the corporate side: some 25 multinationals, with the largest audit firms participating, building impact-accounting methodology from the practitioner direction. Independent, in partnership with IFVI; the two issued a joint exposure draft in 2026.
  • Social Value International (SVI): the standard-setter for social value and SROI accounting, and the field’s practitioner-accreditation infrastructure.

The disclosure bodies: adjacent, and often confused with the above

  • ISSB (International Sustainability Standards Board), under the IFRS Foundation: sustainability disclosure standards; absorbed SASB. Disclosure, not valuation: they tell you what to report, not what it is worth.
  • EFRAG (European Financial Reporting Advisory Group): the EU’s technical standard-setter, and author of the standards closest to the impact worldview. Its ESRS standards are built on double materiality, requiring companies to report their impacts on people and planet, not only the sustainability risks to themselves. The standards were narrowed in the EU’s 2026 simplification, though the double-materiality principle was retained. They remain expressed in metrics and narrative rather than in monetary terms.
  • GRI (Global Reporting Initiative): a widely used sustainability reporting framework, at roughly 400 disclosures.

The impact-investing side

  • GIIN (Global Impact Investing Network): maintains IRIS+, the standard catalog of roughly 750 impact metrics investors use.
  • Impact Frontiers and the Impact Management Platform: the two successors of the Impact Management Project; the Platform, co-chaired by the OECD and UNEP FI, is effectively the field’s coordination hub.
  • B Lab: B Corp certification: company-level impact assessment, moving to mandatory minimums with third-party verification in 2026.

And the accounting profession itself

  • IAASB (International Auditing and Assurance Standards Board): sets the world’s auditing standards. Its new ISSA 5000, effective for reporting periods beginning December 2026, defines assurance on sustainability information, what an auditor can actually sign. Impact numbers become real commercially the moment they are assurable.
  • The IFRS Foundation is also custodian of the Integrated Reporting Framework, where the six-capitals model was codified, the model this field builds on.
  • Harvard’s Impact-Weighted Accounts project: where it all started. Wound down in 2022; its papers remain the best introduction to the idea of putting impact on financial statements.

Impact accounting in practice

A selection of organizations conducting impact accounting today, and what each implementation demonstrates:

  • Forico (plantation forestry, Tasmania): annual Natural Capital Reports, 2020–2023, in balance-sheet and P&L structure, with KPMG limited assurance. The strongest assurance precedent in the field.
  • Yorkshire Water (UK utility): natural and six-capital accounting since 2015, with DNV limited assurance.
  • Anglian Water (UK utility): six-capitals reporting in its annual Sustainable Finance Impact Report.
  • Kering (luxury): the Environmental Profit & Loss, published open-source annually since 2013. PUMA’s 2011 EP&L was the origin.
  • Olam ofi (food ingredients): an Integrated Impact Statement inside the annual report; one of the few corporate finance functions with an impact mandate in the books.
  • Natura &Co (cosmetics, Brazil): EP&L since 2014.
  • Novartis (pharma): impact valuation of its social, economic and environmental footprint, published as “Measuring Our Impact.”
  • Eisai (pharma, Japan): employment and product impact accounting on the Harvard impact-weighted-accounts methodology.
  • KDDI (telecom, Japan): product and service impact methodology; about ¥500 billion per year in social value from IoT solutions.
  • SK Group (South Korea): Double Bottom Line accounting since 2019, where impact results feed executive compensation, the strongest example of impact figures carrying real weight inside a company.
  • BASF (chemicals): the Value-to-Society pioneer, from 2013; among several early adopters that later scaled back full monetization.
  • Holcim / Ambuja (cement): the KPMG True Value lineage, now paused on monetization.
  • The VBA pilot cohort: SAP, BMW, Bosch, Deutsche Bank, Schaeffler, Acciona, BlackRock and Calvert, catalogued in IFVI’s impact-accounting-in-practice case library.

What’s missing is the system

A field with sophisticated standards bodies, some eighty published sets of accounts, and only a dozen-odd sustained implementations is a field waiting for its infrastructure. Every implementation above was built by hand: consultants, spreadsheets, one-off models; several early adopters have already scaled back. What no one, so far as we can find, had built is the system that produces impact accounts repeatably, comparably, and at a cost that falls with practice.

That is what Sedoha builds: the chart of accounts, the shared map of what gets counted, and the books themselves, kept continuously in software on an open, citable standard. The improvement cycle then shows which strategies move outcomes. To our knowledge, Sedoha is the first accounting software to keep double-entry impact books across all six capitals, and the first company to offer impact accounting as a bookkeeping and accounting service, the way any organization already keeps its financial books. The methodology is how.

If you already measure your impact, you hold most of what the books need. We bring the ledger, for investors & funders, companies & institutions, and nonprofits & social enterprises.

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