Project-Level Business Case

   

“Senior leaders and decision-makers in business need to see a rigorous cost-benefit analysis, and a projected payback period with return on investment, before approving any major capital investment – and this includes sustainability initiatives. The “Sustainability ROI Workbook” frames the business case for environmental and social initiatives. It is a useful tool that provides key metrics for use in decision-making and helps to demonstrate how sustainability initiatives help businesses create financial value.”
– Gordon Beal, Vice President – Research, Guidance and Support, Chartered Professional Accountants of Canada (CPA Canada)

                   

The Sustainability ROI Workbook (SRW): Building Compelling Business Cases for Sustainability Initiatives is a “book” cleverly disguised as an Excel workbook. It is a tool that helps build a business case for any sustainability-related project. Explanatory text and graphics are integrated into the Excel worksheets and in pop-up, just-in-time comments that provide guidance on how to fill in fields that require user input. The comprehensive, fill-in-the-blanks Excel workbook is the book.

CFO-friendly

When seeking Chief Financial Officer (CFO) approval for a sustainability-related project, proponents need to ensure that their proposal includes information required in any capital expenditure (CAPEX) request. So, the workbook includes the traditional return on investment (ROI) financial analysis of costs and benefits ― hence, its title. Plus, it includes a Project Appraisal Tool that helps CFOs make better-informed resource allocation decisions in the more turbulent 21st century business environment.

Sustainability champion-friendly

The workbook helps users identify, quantify and monetize all potential business benefits that may arise from a sustainability project.

• Superset of potential benefits: Users are prompted to estimate how their project directly or indirectly contributes to over 25 possible benefits for sustainability projects.
• Comprehensive guidance on quantifying and monetizing potential benefits: Dozens of just-in-time, pop-up comments provide examples of direct and indirect benefits that other companies have reaped from similar projects, to help users monetize estimates of possible improvements.
• Flexible sustainability goals: Users can use whatever ESG framework they prefer when assessing how the initiative improves company progress toward its sustainability-related goals.
• Automatic ROI calculations: The workbook automatically does the return on investment (ROI) calculations for the project: its payback period, the internal rate of return (IRR), and the net present value (NPV) of its future cash flows.
• Includes risks of not doing the project: In addition to quantifying potential risks associated with doing the project, the workbook monetizes over 25 potential risks of not doing the project.

Free, open-source resource 

To expedite its use by the global legions of sustainability champions, SRW  is a self-published, free, open-source resource. Users are encouraged to create tailored versions for specific sectors, users, other technology platforms, other languages, etc. To access the workbook, click the blue “Download the ROI Workbook” button.  You can do this an unlimited number of times.

Note: The 6th edition of the workbook (SRW 6.0) was published in April 2019 and updated again in June 2019. It obsoletes and replaces previous editions and has several usability improvements.