The certification setup experience will take you through a personalized questionnaire to check your company's eligibility for certification and understand the scope of your company's operations. By getting to know more about your company, we'll be able to tailor your assessment to your company's size, industry, and location.

Once you've completed all sections, you will receive your company's assessment and can start measuring your company's impact.

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1. Gather company documents

2. Eligibility: Ownership Type

Provide company information

3. Scoping: Related Entities

4. Scoping: Customize Your Assessment

If you have selected skip set up, your view will not include steps 1 through 3 which are required for certification. See How to opt into B Corp certification, in order to assess your eligibility for B Corp certification.

Navigating between sections or viewing a particular section can be done by selecting ‘back to setup’. 

You are able to save information as you have it available and input information once it is readily available to you. 

If the information provided requires B Lab’s analysis, the subsequent sections of the set up process will be available in a view only mode, and not editable until B Lab’s team has reviewed it.  You may see an eye icon and ‘view section’ instead of an option to edit the section. This may be the result if the section is ‘view only’ because a B Lab analyst is reviewing your results.

Users are able to edit each section unless the section is locked for analyst review. This information will be visible at the top of the page. 

An overview of certification setup experience statuses:

If you have an existing account on bimpactassessment.net this article will guide you to opting into the new standards.

From the Home page, you will see a card that reads Get ready for the new standards! Select the “Get started” button to view the toggle menu.

or a card that reads Keep exploring the new standards! Select the “Continue” button to view the toggle menu.

The toggle menu will disclaim a few aspects of the new assessment and share some key guides on continuing through the process. You can find these guides in our Understanding the New Standards folder.

Once you reach the Your New Standards Assessment we encourage you to review the right sided menu listing Your company’s attributes. These attributes will select the appropriate view of the new standards for you. If you find the attributes to be in error, please visit the setup process and review the Customize your assessment stage. Once you have confirmed your company’s attributes, select “Open Assessment”.

Once this is selected, the left sided menu will include Self Assessment at the bottom for easy reference. 

The self assessment dashboard is similar to the Question Filter in the V1.6 B Impact assessment. 

The features in the dashboard show the company’s progress on meeting the sub requirements. 
Each sub requirement will have the option to show one of three statuses:

If a sub requirement is optional for your business, it will have a fourth status available as "Not Applicable":

By selecting the specific requirement, you can select the status that best helps you with its progress.

The summary of the statuses will be visible on the dashboard view and will be categorized in the following cards:
Incomplete Tasks which include those that are “Not Started” and “In Progress”. 
Completed Tasks which include those that are “Done: Evidence Ready” and those that may be "Not Applicable". These statuses are mainly used by you and your team members and are not reviewed by B Lab or the Assurance providers until the audit phase has started.

The main section of the dashboard offers a filter on the following categories:

• Impact Topic
• Assignee
• Status
• Due date
  
  

Learn more about how to track a requirement in the Self assessment.

All requirements visible on your self assessment dashboard will be able to have individual tracking. 

The individual requirement will have features that will help companies do the following:

• Choose an Assignee of the requirement which will be a Team Member who is part of the company’s profile. This will help individual team members keep track of the requirements they can support best. 

• Determine a due date which can be for a variety of milestones, some can be related to documentation providing or compiling of records and so on.

• Select a status which can show to all or other team members which requirements need particular attention. 
  

The compliance criteria captures the specific data and records that will provide verification for the completion of the requirement. You can select “view action items” to add specific due dates and assignees as well as uploading evidence directly. 
This is also a key place to engage with your team by notifying them in the comments.

The compliance criteria card is also where you can provide documentation. 

The Scope summarizes the finalized aspects of certification as they pertain to your entities and assessment details. In some cases, this can be generated automatically once you complete relevant prompts in the setup pages. In other cases, a B Lab Specialist will confirm key aspects before a scope memo is generated. 

To find the scope memo, navigate to the Setup page under Certify.

A populated scope memo will appear on the right tab of the Sections in Setup. 

In it you will find information such as:

• When the setup information was completed and submitted in full.

• The length of time the scope memo is valid for use in Requirement responses. 
  
  

This means that the information is valid to be used for assessment responses until the date listed. Past that date requires updated information in setup prompts.

Additionally, you will have “Entities in scope” which include the entities that are required to be considered in assessment responses for operational considerations (such as entity A’s workforce and entity B’s workforce). In this section, you will find entities where the legal requirement applies, which requires a change and is explained more on the Legal Requirement Tool. 

If your company has more than one entity or location of operation, please navigate to the Company detail to provide a list of sites for all entities in scope.

You will also see a section “Assessment scope” which outlines the value of your assessment size with the details related to size, sector and industry. The company’s size is determined based on the Fiscal year end date, Revenue, FTE Equivalency and size category. This determines the Requirements visible in the Self Assessment.

This article reviews the way to attach and provide documents in the Self Assessment experience. 

You can learn how to use the documentation hub for the Self Assessment in this article or review How to use the Documentation Hub for more information. 

To find the documentation hub, select a specific requirement that relates to the documentation you have and click the “View details” button on that requirement. 

Under the Compliance Criteria section, select the “Attach Evidence” which will open the Upload Document card. You will have the option to upload from your Computer or the Documentation Hub.  

When at least one piece of evidence is provided, the button will be replaced with a plus symbol [+] to add any additional evidence.

At the bottom of each Compliance criteria is a section for Comments where you can give information to your team members or B Lab as context about the documentation. This is an optional section to engage with, rather than a required aspect. You can also review all activity related to comments and Evidence in the All Activity section. 

For the self assessment, there is a section for reference on the left hand side menu called Documentation Hub. This is a central location users can refer to for all the documentations that have been uploaded for any of the compliance criteria within the self assessment.

 

Refer to this article for how to use the documentation hub for your self assessment use.

If you have already uploaded a few documents you will see your view as a table list of all the documents and the impact topic they are associated with, as well as who uploaded the document and the date of the upload. The search box on the right hand side can search words for any of the fields listed such as Document Name, Impact Topic, Uploader etc. 

If you have not yet uploaded documents, you can use the Upload Document  button on the right side of the screen which can be used for any document type on your computer.

In order to have the document relate to more than one Impact Topic, you can select the three dots on the right hand side of the document and select View & Modify.

In this view, you can select the Add Compliance Criteria button on the top right which will allow you to select more Compliance Criteria that relate to the document. When a Compliance Criteria is selected, there is a comment section that will be viewable by all users, company and B Lab.