If you are an accountant in practice, you are standing in front of the biggest new advisory opportunity since cloud accounting.

Not tax. Not R&D. Sustainability.

For years ESG has felt like something “out there” that belongs to consultants in lab coats, climate scientists, or corporate comms teams. But that is changing fast. New reporting standards are pulling sustainability data into the financial statements. Assurance requirements are following. Clients are asking harder questions.

And all of that sits squarely in your world.

This is the central argument that came through in a recent conversation between Stephen Pell, founder and CEO of neoeco and former audit partner, and Dan Firmager, ESG Adviser and Chartered Accountant at Kreston Reeves, a UK B Corp firm that has just launched its ESG reporting and advisory services.

Their message to the profession is simple.

You do not need to be a climate scientist to lead on sustainability. You need a ledger, a system you can trust, and the professional scepticism you already use every day.

The rest follows.

ESG is not a cost centre. It is a growth engine.

One of the biggest barriers to accountants engaging with sustainability is a myth you will recognise from many client conversations.

ESG is just a cost. It is extra work. It will hurt profitability.

Look at what is actually happening in the real economy and you get a very different picture.

The net zero economy in the UK has grown far faster than the wider economy. While overall GDP has been more or less flat, the net zero economy has been growing in double digits. That is real revenue, real jobs, real investment.

There is strong evidence that sustainable investment strategies are outperforming traditional portfolios on returns, not underperforming.

Major economies that are positioning themselves for clean tech and low carbon growth, such as China and India, are not doing this as a charitable exercise. They have run the numbers. They see a competitive advantage.

As Dan put it, we are already seeing “decoupling” between emissions and economic growth. You can cut impact without killing profitability. The idea that sustainability and profit are mutually exclusive is not just outdated, it is now provably wrong.

For your clients, the business case shows up in very practical places:

Winning and retaining key customers who now screen suppliers on ESG.

Lowering the cost of capital through access to green finance and sustainability-linked loans.

Cutting waste that hits both emissions and the P&L.

Attracting and keeping staff, especially younger generations who actively research employer sustainability credentials and walk away when they see greenwashing.

If you treat ESG as a compliance chore, you will only ever do the minimum. If you treat it as a strategic lever, it becomes part of your growth story, and your clients’ growth story.

Regulation is the catalyst, not the end game

You do not need to be a standards expert to see where this is going.

New requirements such as the ISSB IFRS S1 and S2 climate related standards, Europe’s CSRD and the emerging UK Sustainability Reporting Standards are all moving in the same direction. Climate and other sustainability information is being pulled into the financial reporting perimeter. Disclosures will sit alongside financials and, over time, will be subject to assurance.

Stephen’s view is that we will eventually see global convergence on a small number of baseline standards. Climate is the starting point because greenhouse gas accounting is relatively mature. Over time, reporting will widen to cover other material impacts such as biodiversity, water, land use and social issues. Europe’s concept of “double materiality” gives a glimpse of that future. It asks two questions:

1. What is material to the company from a financial point of view.

2. What is material to the outside world in terms of the company’s impacts on people and planet.

Combine the “inside out” and “outside in” views and you get a much richer picture of risk, opportunity and responsibility.

For you, the immediate point is simpler. These disclosures are going into the financial statements. They will need systems, controls, policies, evidence. They will need materiality judgments. They will need assurance.

This is accountancy work.

As Dan put it, once sustainability disclosures are required in the financial statements, it is hard to imagine a world where accountants are not preparing them in the same way they prepare year end accounts now.

The missing link: finance and sustainability do not talk to each other

If this is such a natural fit for the profession, what has held things back?

Stephen explained it through his own journey. He grew up in audit and built and exited an international accounting practice. His brother went in a different direction and became a leading academic in life cycle assessment (LCA), building highly complex impact models for major manufacturers.

LCA is the gold standard methodology for measuring environmental impact across a product’s life cycle. It looks far beyond carbon. It can take into account over a hundred impact categories: water use, land use, acidification, ecotoxicity and so on.

The problem was that these two worlds barely spoke to each other.

On one side, you have highly granular sustainability modelling that can tell you, down to the component, how a product affects the planet. On the other, you have financial reporting systems that are closed, controlled, audited and trusted.

Between them, a gap.

Most of the early ESG software in the market tried to bridge that gap from the sustainability side. They were built as carbon calculators and survey tools, asking companies to feed in high level estimates that were then mapped to benchmarks and averages.

From an accountant’s perspective, this approach feels uncomfortable for at least three reasons:

• It is light on data quality. Aggregated estimates and self reported survey inputs do not stand up well to assurance.

• It is not easily reconcilable to the ledger. You cannot easily trace a reported number back to an underlying transaction.

• It does not give you enough granularity to make serious business decisions. If you cannot see emissions at supplier, department or asset level, how do you change behaviour or renegotiate contracts?

The core insight behind neoeco was to flip this problem on its head.

Instead of dragging sustainability data towards the reporting frameworks, start with the thing you already trust: the financial ledger. This is the founded concept behind Financially-integrated Sustainability Management.

The ledger already defines the reporting boundary of the organisation. It already has controls, audit trails and a closed loop. It already reflects how cash and value flow through the business.

If you can take LCA style impact data and attach it to individual transactions in that ledger, you can create a new type of record: a financially integrated sustainability ledger.

That ledger becomes a single, trusted system of record that can serve many purposes.

• Regulatory reporting under whichever standard applies.

• Management dashboards and KPIs that CFOs actually use.

• Evidence packs for insurers, lenders and investors.

• Scenario analysis to find the lowest impact route to a given financial outcome.

This is the architecture neoeco has built, and it is the core reason firms like Kreston Reeves have chosen to work with it. It feels like accounting software. It speaks the language of ledgers, reconciliations, controls and audit trails.

In other words, it feels like home.

What this looks like in practice

So what does financially integrated sustainability look like when you put it in front of a client?

The best examples are often the simplest.

Dan described one conversation with a client who was frustrated with printing costs. The business was spending about £100,000 a year on printer leases, paper and ink. They were not even using double sided printing by default. They had more devices across sites than they needed.

From a pure finance lens, you can see a cost saving opportunity. From an impact lens, you can see a way to cut emissions and waste. Combine the two views, and you have a very easy win:

• Switch to double sided printing as default.

• Rationalise the number of printers.

You save roughly £50,000 a year and reduce environmental impact at the same time. No complex modelling. No heavyweight change programme. Just better use of data you already have.

Now imagine being able to do that across every cost line in the P&L because you can see emissions at transaction level, supplier level and cost centre level.

That is the power of attaching impact factors directly to accounting entries rather than treating sustainability as something floating above the numbers.

It also matters for assurance. If all you can show an auditor is a block of grouped spend with an average emissions factor applied, they will naturally question the assumptions. If you can show the trace from disclosed figures down to individual transactions, matched with robust impact data, you are back in familiar territory.

Why accountants are uniquely positioned

Throughout their conversation, Stephen and Dan kept coming back to the same point.

The core skills the sustainability transition needs are already baked into the accounting profession.

You are already good at:

• Designing processes and internal controls.

• Making materiality judgments.

• Working with incomplete information and building supportable estimates.

• Coordinating multidisciplinary inputs from valuers, actuaries, tax specialists and lawyers.

• Building reporting packs that boards trust and rely on.

Sustainability is not asking you to become a climate scientist. It is asking you to apply those skills to a new category of data.

Professional bodies have recognised this. ACCA, ICAEW and others are already embedding climate and sustainability into their syllabi. New trainees will not see this as “extra”. It will be part of what it means to be an accountant.

In a profession that has sometimes struggled with its public image, that is a huge opportunity. As Dan pointed out, accountancy is not always seen as an exciting career path. Bringing sustainability into the heart of what you do gives new entrants a clearer sense of purpose and impact.

You are no longer just “counting the coins”. You are helping to steer capital and business models in a direction that is better for your clients and better for the world they operate in.

From compliance exercise to management culture

If you treat ESG reporting as an annual compliance project, it will quickly turn into an expensive chore. A rushed data collection exercise. A glossy PDF. Twelve months of silence.

That is not what your clients need.

What Stephen and Dan both advocate is something much more familiar to accountants: embedding sustainability into the normal rhythms of management information and risk management.

That means:

• Bringing climate and other relevant risks into the risk register, instead of building a separate ESG document that no one reads.

• Adding one or two sustainability KPIs and trends into monthly or quarterly management packs, rather than waiting for the year end.

• Using your existing supplier onboarding and procurement processes to ask better questions, instead of launching standalone ESG questionnaires that feel like extra admin.

When you surface sustainability metrics in the same reports as cash, profit and covenants, it naturally becomes part of the conversation in the boardroom.

Technology can help. Platforms like neoeco use AI and impact databases to automate much of the heavy lifting on data collection and categorisation. That turns sustainability metrics into something closer to real time finance data rather than an annual manual exercise.

But the mindset shift is more important than the tools.

ESG needs to move from “nice to have” into “how we run the business”.

Accountants are very good at that kind of cultural embedding because you have been doing it for decades with financial discipline.

What this means for your firm

If you are in practice, especially in an owner managed or mid market firm, the natural questions are:

• Where do we even start?

• What will we actually sell?

• How do we do this without pretending to be something we are not?

Kreston Reeves’ approach is instructive.

They have started with ESG reporting and advisory services built on a financially integrated platform. Carbon reporting is an initial entry point that clients understand, but the service is designed to go beyond a static carbon footprint.

They are:

• Running stakeholder interviews with management, staff and key customers to understand what really matters commercially.

• Helping clients map climate and sustainability risks onto existing risk registers and business plans.

• Using transaction level data to highlight where cost savings and impact reductions align.

• Preparing clients for the information requests that will start coming from their own customers, lenders and investors.

Underpinning all of this is the same professional discipline that sits behind their audit and advisory work. Data quality, auditability and clarity.

This is a model any progressive firm can adapt. You do not need to build the technology yourself. You do need to decide you are going to lead, not wait for the Big Four and a handful of consultancies to define the space without you.

A call to action for accountants

Stephen ended the conversation with a line that sums up the opportunity in front of you.

You do not need a lab coat or a PhD to lead on sustainability. You can be an accountant.

What you need is:

• A ledger and a system you can trust that connects financial and non financial data.

• A willingness to upskill on sustainability concepts in the same way you once upskilled on new accounting standards or tax rules.

• Partners and tools that respect the way you work, rather than forcing you into someone else’s workflow.

• The confidence to start small, learn quickly and build from there.

If you wait until legislation forces your clients to act, you will be doing the minimum under pressure.

If you start now, you can shape the agenda, create real value for clients and build a service line that attracts the next generation of talent into your firm.

The world does not just need more ESG reports. It needs trusted professionals who can connect impact and money in a way that stands up to scrutiny.

That sounds a lot like the job of an accountant.