Tailored, Not Templated: Building Sustainability Reports That Fit Your Needs 

When it comes to sustainability reporting, one size definitely doesn’t fit all. 

Some investors need to plug data into annual reports or external frameworks like SFDR or EPRA, others need visuals for board packs, clean exports for internal carbon tracking, or custom views that speak directly to their asset managers.  

Most need all of the above. 

Every investor has their own focus when it comes to sustainability performance. Yet too often, sustainability reports are generic and static. Real asset investors are finding that standard reports don’t always answer the specific questions their stakeholders are asking. This is where custom sustainability reporting becomes essential – tailoring sustainability data to the audience and the decision at hand. 

Investors Demand Tailored Sustainability Insights 

In real asset investing, no two portfolios or stakeholders are exactly alike. 

Clients often tell us, “We need a report that highlights exactly what our investors care about.” They want the ability to slice and dice sustainability data to create outputs that align with their unique strategy and meet various framework requirements.  

For example, a client may need to report in line with GRESB assessments, fulfil SFDR obligations, and also produce an internal sustainability dashboard for executives – each with different metrics and formats. 

These demands reflect a broader trend. Sustainability frameworks and investor expectations have increased, from TCFD and SFDR to voluntary initiatives like GRI and GRESB. Each brings its own definitions and priorities, and a generic annual report or static PDF cannot cover all these angles.  

Real asset investors need the flexibility to customise outputs: perhaps an energy performance deep-dive for a climate-conscious investor, a health-and-wellbeing focus for a social impact report, or a simple fact sheet of key sustainability metrics in a spreadsheet for a due diligence request. The goal is to deliver the right information to the right people, without making them wade through irrelevant data. 

The Challenge of One-Size-Fits-All Reporting 

Achieving this level of customisation is not straightforward. Traditional reporting processes are often rigid. Sustainability teams might spend weeks manually reformatting data for each new request. One major challenge is that underlying sustainability data is complex and must be carefully interpreted for each context.

If you’re pulling numbers from different sources or templates, there’s a risk of inconsistencies or errors when tailoring figures for a specific purpose. For example, one framework’s “carbon footprint” might not align with another’s “carbon intensity,” so a metric could be misinterpreted if context isn’t clear. 

Another challenge is simply the time and effort involved. Without the right tools, producing a custom report means exporting data into Excel, performing calculations or pivots, and building visuals by hand every time. Not only is this time-consuming, it’s also error-prone and hard to repeat. In fact, in a 2024 survey by KPMG, the leading sustainability Data Management System was still spreadsheets (with 47% of respondents). This means that almost half of companies still rely on manual methods for managing sustainability data, which makes tailored reporting a laborious and risky endeavour. Each manual step is an opportunity for something to go wrong – a cell not updated, a figure mis-copied – potentially undermining trust in the final output. 

And what if a new regulation asks for a metric you weren’t tracking? Keeping up with evolving standards is a moving target. Custom reporting must be agile enough to incorporate new requirements on the fly. Without a flexible system, sustainability teams risk scrambling each time standards change, or a stakeholder has a new question. 

Most sustainability teams aren’t asking for bells and whistles. They’re asking for the ability to answer the questions that matter to their investors and internal stakeholders. 

“Can I just get what I need, when I need it?” 

Our clients need specific outputs, tailored to their own business model and priorities. They want to interact with the data live and flexibly, and want their reports to reflect their indicators, not someone else’s template. 

That might mean: 

• Visualising fund-level carbon trends in a format your board understands 

• Creating tailored dashboards that align with your internal KPIs 

• Highlighting where ESG data coverage is incomplete 

• Mapping custom risk profiles to support CapEx and investment decisions 

• Comparing performance across regions or asset types in real-time 

• Designing reports that match the structure and language of your organisation 

And they want to do all of this without stitching together spreadsheets across multiple systems. 

Creating truly custom sustainability reports at scale requires both flexible technology and a deep understanding of sustainability frameworks. At EVORA, we address this by combining an agile data platform with our consulting expertise. 

A Practical Approach to Tailored Sustainability Reporting 

Our in-house platform provides the ability to filter, aggregate, and format sustainability data in myriad ways. You can quickly generate a report at the asset level, fund level, or portfolio level depending on the situation. The platform isn’t limited to a single template – users can configure their own views and outputs. For example, if an investor asks for energy use per square meter across all office assets last year, that query can be run and exported to a clean spreadsheet or chart. If another stakeholder wants a climate risk scenario analysis, the relevant data can be pulled from the same system without starting from scratch. And we back this up with our sustainability expertise.  

Our teams work daily with frameworks like GRESB, INREV, EPRA, and SFDR, as well as evaluating over-arching climate and investment risks, that means we can help you build reports that help you protect and enhance the value of your assets. We ensure that any metrics align with the official definitions and methodologies your stakeholders expect. We don’t just offer a “data dump” with no narrative, we enable reports that actually matter to our clients and their stakeholders, and lets them use their sustainability data in a way that suits their investment strategies. 

“We let our clients replicate their business logic inside the platform, reduce risk from versioning or data corruption, and make it part of our clients’ everyday workflows. We can take a custom Excel-based risk tool and build it into SIERA. That could include the data we already collect; performance data, certifications, and action plans – plus proprietary metrics the client sources elsewhere. It looks like their original model, but now it’s live, accurate, and integrated into the same system they use for everything else.”, says Nick Hogg, Director & Senior Product Manager, at EVORA. 

A custom sustainability report or dashboard should make it easy for the reader to understand how a portfolio is performing on the sustainability topics they care about. By using a centralised data source and configurable reporting tools, we ensure every number in a tailored report is traceable back to its source (no isolated spreadsheets floating around). That maintains consistency even as we create different views for different audiences. 

Custom Reporting Is a Must-Have, Not a Nice-to-Have 

Real sustainability performance lives in the details. 

Investors need to know where to act, how to prioritise, and what story their data is telling. That means moving beyond generic templates and building tools that reflect the complexity of their portfolios and the nuance of their strategies. 

With the right combination of platform flexibility and domain expertise, that’s possible.  

Talk to us if you’d like to see how our Custom Reporting possibilities can support your ESG journey in action.