Advancing Sustainable Income Accounting: An Australian Case Study

Abstract

This paper is an exploration of the sustainability accounting literature to investigate the variety of accounting measurement instruments/tools/methodologies applied to achieve business sustainability and whether there is a real practical concern and application by companies toward the revenue side of sustainability, as well as, cost side. The research present a classification of different implemented sustainable accounting tools to measure corporate environmental and social costs due to the limitation of tools that implemented to measure corporate environmental and social revenues. Therefore, the paper adopts an Australian textile case study to investigate and analysis reality in practice. The outcome of the case study indicates that the companies may use the implemented sustainable accounting tools which are commonly applied to measure cost side of sustainability to measure, as well, revenue side, although the majority of the business sustainability literature focuses mainly on the cost side and how to measure it.