What is the Data Consolidator?

After reporting and confirming the data in the ESRS reporting measures, companies can proceed to the data consolidation process. In the data consolidation process, confirmed registrations are processed through a consolidation engine to prepare them for inclusion in the final statement. This process involves two main tracks; automatic and manual consolidation, depending if there are multiple text responses or not (see below image).

The consolidation of confirmed measures is handled differently depending on the type of data: either automatically, making the data visible in the statement editor, or manually through the data consolidator, which applies to qualitative data with multiple responses.

Automatic Consolidation

• Includes quantitative data, dropdown selections, and yes/no responses.
  • The aggregation method for quantitative measure points depends on the nature of the data. E.g. Figures representing a number of employees will be averaged across all periods for a single org unit, then the org unit averages are summed together to find the organizational total figure.
• Happens behind the scenes and consolidated figures are automatically populated in the Statement Editor, bypassing any need for manual consolidation in the data consolidator.

Manual Consolidation - also referred to as the Data Consolidator

• Includes qualitative measure points with multiple responses. This situation typically arises when data is reported by multiple organizational units or reporting frequency exceeds once a year.
  
• Happens in the ‘Consolidate data’ view, with or without support from AI. You as a user integrate multiple text responses into one unified and coherent response before the data moves onto to the Statement Editor.

The Data Consolidator is supported for ESRS 2 and all topical standards. The following reporting measures are not yet supported for consolidation:

• Entity-specific matters that were reported using all four MDR measures
• The info above only applies to entity-specific sustainability matters or IROs (cases where all four MDRs were used for a given matter) → the Data consolidator and Statement Editor support the consolidation of entity-specific metrics with a new iteration of the Entity-specific Metrics template.

Start consolidation

Once the consolidation process begins by pressing Start Consolidation, confirmed data undergoes automatic mapping in the background. 

This background mapping process can take time, potentially several hours, depending on the volume of reported data. You can safely leave the page and will receive an email notification once the mapping is complete.

When the automatic consolidation is completed, you can access the ‘Consolidate Data’ view (see image below), which displays the text questions with multiple answers that require manual consolidation. Here you can merge multiple answers for the same data point into a single, cohesive response.

The yellow box in the above image displays the original reported data, which can be filtered by organizational unit, reporting period, and reporter. The blue box is where you consolidate multiple responses into a single answer. Once the data has been edited you can confirm consolidation in the upper-right corner. Once data is confirmed, the data can be pushed to the next step ‘Sustainability Statement’.

The pink arrows indicate disclosures, while the orange arrows represent data point - questions answered by reporters within the ESRS Reporting Templates. All responses for a specific data point are displayed in the yellow box. On the right, in the blue box, the compiled responses are shown, where customers begin consolidating them into a single answer.

When there is new or updated data registered and confirmed in Data Reporting, you can re-run the data consolidation by pressing the ‘Update data’ button to see if there is any new data that needs to be reviewed and consolidated.

Update Data

• If the source data in the registrations has been updated on a previously confirmed consolidated data point, the response will be overwritten. 
• If there is new data available that has not been consolidated previously, the confirmed consolidated data points will not be affected by the update. 
• An "updated" indicator (red dot) shows next to all items from the same updated registration in the left-hand pane of the ‘Consolidate Data’ view as well as an informative text indicating which org unit has potential changes out of the responses.
• In this version it is not specified which exact data point has been edited, seeing as it only detects if a whole measure has been edited, rather than specific measure points.

AI Consolidation

If you have AI activated,  the system automatically consolidates the responses with AI and provides a suggested answer (see below image). You can review, edit, and modify this suggestion before confirming the consolidation.

AI generates the consolidated response in the language used the most in the reported data. The AI cannot be applied to selected data points; it is automatically applied to all responses in the ‘Consolidate Data’ view. 

Confirming the consolidation

Regardless of whether the customer consolidates and rewrites responses manually or uses AI, the final step in the consolidation process is to confirm the consolidation by pressing Confirm consolidation. Once all data is confirmed, the consolidated data, along with all other data, is made available in the Statement Editor.