Exploring the effects of sustainability accounting information systems: the role of sustainability balanced scorecard

In the last twenty years the companies and governments (see the recent directive—2014/95/EU) paid increasing attention to sustainability issues: they gained strategic relevance for the business and deserved interest of stakeholders. According to these sustainability information needs, academics and practitioners examined the development of new accounting information systems (AISs), aimed to collect, elaborate and integrate environmental and social data. In this paper, we consider the Sustainability Balanced Scorecard (SBSC), considering it as an urge to develop and integrate the AISs. The aim of this paper, through a case study, is to investigate the role of SBSC and try to highlight a relationship between the different designs of SBSC proposed by literature and different levels of integration of AISs. This work provides a theoretical contribution to the debate on accounting information system for sustainability and offers useful reflections for the practitioners about the potentialities and critical aspects of SBSC.