Integrated Reporting Framework
Integrated Reporting brings six capitals, financial, manufactured, intellectual, human, social and relationship, natural, into one report showing how a business actually turns them into value, instead of a set of numbers detached from how the business works.
Six capitals sit around a central business model, each one feeding in with its own arrow.
Reach for this when…
- Your annual report and your sustainability report tell two disconnected stories.
- Investors ask how your ESG numbers relate to your financial performance and you can't answer cleanly.
- A board member asks what your business actually depends on beyond cash.
How to run it
- Identify what your organisation draws on across all six capitals: financial, manufactured, intellectual, human, social and relationship, natural.
- Map how your business model transforms those inputs into outputs.
- State outcomes: what changed for the capitals as a result, positive and negative.
- Apply materiality: report what actually affects your ability to create value, not everything you measure.
- Connect the narrative: link the financial story to the non-financial one in a single report, not two.
A worked example
Situation. Emmanuel Habimana was chief executive of Umurage Community Bank, a community bank in Kigali, Rwanda, whose annual report had always covered financial capital only.
Applied. He mapped the bank's other capitals: human, its branch staff and their training, and social and relationship, the trust with market-trader borrowers built over twenty years, and connected both into the next report.
Result. The report now showed how staff turnover in rural branches was quietly eroding the trust the loan book depended on, a connection the finance team had never had to state before.
The catch
Because the framework sets no fixed metrics, comparing one integrated report to another is genuinely hard, materiality gets defined differently by every organisation that uses it. It's also demanding to run properly, it needs finance, sustainability, and operations people talking to each other, which many organisations aren't set up for. Treat it as a way of thinking about value creation first, a reporting format second.
If the non-financial section reads like a separate document stitched to the accounts, it isn't integrated reporting yet.
Origin: International Integrated Reporting Council (IIRC)