ETI Corporate Annual Reporting Guidelines 2006

This paper explains the ETI corporate annual reporting process for 2006, including the completion of a reporting template in the form of an Excel Reportbook for companies, and details of how the reports will be assessed. With these guidelines is an Excel Reportbook which sets out all the questions each company must answer and the data it must provide.

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Purpose

The corporate annual reporting process is designed to:

Identify what each company is doing to improve labour standards throughout those parts of its supply chain which are covered by its ETI membership.
Investigate whether those efforts are succeeding in achieving sustainable improvements.
Compare different approaches and outcomes in order to learn what works and to share that learning.
Assist each corporate member to evaluate its own efforts and how they compare with those of other members.
Reinforce members’ commitment to transparency and public accountability.

The Reportbook

With these guidelines is an Excel Reportbook which sets out all the questions each company must answer and the data it must provide. The completed Reportbook will constitute the company’s annual report.
Use of the Reportbook for reporting to ETI is mandatory. Some corporate members may wish to use the Reportbook to compile data during the year. Others will prefer to adapt their existing data management systems to collect the necessary information and then insert the data into the Reportbook at the end of the year.
Format of Reports

When more space is required for an answer in the Management section (M1 – M5) the row in which the answer is to be inserted can be reformatted so that it expands to allow sufficient space for the full answer (see IT Tech Notes). Subject to that exception the format of the Reportbook must not be altered. ETI’s aggregation and analysis of company data requires every report to follow the same format.

The Reportbook is also available on CD-ROM from ETI Secretariat.

Terminology

Terms used in these guidelines which appear in red are explained in the relevant section of the text and the definitions are repeated in the Glossary section of these guidelines. Guidance on the meanings of terms which appear in red text in the Reportbook can also be obtained by clicking on the cell in which the text appears.

2006 Reportbook

The Reportbook has been revised in the light of the experience of using the new reporting framework for the 2005 Annual Reports. These guidelines draw attention to and explain the most important changes.

2005 Data

In many cases the company’s answers to questions in the Management Indicators and the data in the Performance Input table will build upon or even be identical to its answers or data in its 2005 Reportbook. Accordingly, ETI will send to each member company who submitted a 2005 annual report a copy of the 2006 Reportbook into which ETI has cut and pasted the relevant answers and data from that company’s 2005 annual report. However, where the question in the 2006 Reportbook is new or is substantially different from the question in the 2005 Reportbook on which it is based, ETI will not paste the old answer into the 2006 Reportbook. These 2005 answers and data should be amended, updated or overwritten as appropriate so that when the 2006 Reportbook is submitted to ETI it represents a full and accurate account of the company’s activities during 2006.

Incomplete Answers

2005 was a transitional year in which ETI introduced a new reporting framework and asked companies to begin providing data that ETI had not sought in previous years. ETI accepted that many companies would not be able to provide all the data sought in their 2005 reports. It was emphasised, however, that companies were expected to put in place the systems to enable them to provide all the data sought.

Accordingly, ETI expects the company to answer all the questions in the 2006 Reportbook and to provide complete data for the whole of 2006. The only exception to this requirement is where the 2006 Reportbook seeks data which was not requested in the 2005 Reportbook (e.g. categories of workers at supply sites – Columns T-X in the Input Table – see main document).

If there are cases where a company is unable to answer a question it should give an explanation in the details/comments box for that question of why it has been unable to do so, the steps it is taking to overcome the problem and when it anticipates that it will be able to answer the question.

Deadline for 2006 Annual Report

The deadline for submission of the company’s completed 2006 Reportbook is Wednesday, 28 February 2007. The deadline for the 2005 reports was put back to the end of March 2006 to allow companies more time to adapt to the new reporting framework in what was a transitional year. The deadline has now been reinstated to the end of February to allow sufficient time for the analysis by ETI of the reports and the provision of feedback to companies as early as possible during 2007.

Help

If the company has any questions about using the 2006 Reportbook it should contact:

Niaz Alam: niaz@eti.org.uk

Downloads

On some browsers, you will need to right-click and select 'Save Target As' (or similar) to simply download and save these files rather than opening them. The ZIP archive contains an MS Word version of the same document as the first PDF.

ETI Corporate Annual Reporting Guidelines 2006 [PDF, 207kb]

ETI Corporate Annual Reporting Guidelines and Reportbook 2006
[ZIP Archive containing an MS Word version of the Guidelines & an MS Excel workbook to complete, 7.8Mb]