Sustainability Balanced Scorecard as Cost Accounting Instrument for Small and Medium Sized Companies

This paper deals with the sustainability management concept of the Sustainability Balanced Scorecard (SBSC), which is a further development of the Balanced Scorecard (BSC) developed by Kaplan and Norton in the 1990s. In the SBSC the four classical perspectives of the BSC, which comprise “Finance”, “Customers”, “Internal Processes” and “Learning & Development”, are expanded to include environmental and social aspects (“Non Market”) enabling sustainability aspects to be fully integrated into the strategic management of companies. After a generic presentation of the elements of a BSC this paper shows the individual steps for the implementation of an SBSC, which as a heuristic for the creation of a target system, can contribute to the transformation of sustainability strategies into actions. The “openness” of the SBSC makes it possible that sustainability is not limited to a small number of companies that are primarily active in ecologically and socially oriented sectors, but appears practicable for all those companies that want to improve their performance in all three dimensions of sustainability through increases in ecological- and social-effectiveness and rises in ecological- and social-efficiency. By overcoming the “trade-off” between profit orientation and the focus on sustainability it is thus possible to achieve through enlarged consumer- and producer surplus an important contribution to the overall increase in the welfare economy