Review Process Schedule for companies on the Small Enterprise Approach

Modified on Fri, 29 Sep, 2023 at 4:10 PM

After completing the B Impact Assessment, eligible companies interested in pursuing certification undergo a review process with B Lab to determine if they meet the 80-point bar for Certification.

The Review process is intended to get you effectively and efficiently through verification according to the specific characteristics of each business!

Find the process schedules for other companies below:

Small Enterprise Approach: typically less than 50 FTE and earning less than 10 MM USD in revenue
Small-Medium Enterprise Approach: typically 50-250 FTEs or earning more than USD 10MM in revenue
Medium Enterprise Approach: typically companies with more than 250 FTEs

Learn more about the different Review Approaches and which one applies to you here.

Review Process

The review process is central to the B Corp Certification and Community - it is our process to ensure that B Corps are stewards in creating a positive impact and meet the highest standards of social and environmental performance. Before the Review process your company’s assessment score reflects a self-reported and unverified score. Not all questions in the B Impact Assessment are straightforward to understand. Our goal for this process is to learn more about your business and to arrive at a verified score that applies the standards according to their intent and consistently with how they have been applied across the B Corp community. This is meant both to preserve the credibility of the certification and to support companies in designing a road map of what they want to measure and improve upon.

Stage of Review Process	B Lab action items	Company action items	Timelines

Companies pass through 3 stages to prepare for the Verification process with the Evaluation Team.

Evaluation Queue	Confirm company eligibility for B Corp Certification and Review Approach	Complete B Corp Statement, a quality assurance measure that requires an executive to sign a statement indicating that to the best of their knowledge, all responses were provided honestly and accurately. It is accompanied by a text description of your understanding of the BIA and how it was completed.	Complete B Corp Statement within 4 weeks of submitting your assessment Learn more here about our current evaluation wait time
Evaluation Queue		You will also be prompted to upload evidence that you’ve completed the Legal Requirement (if applicable) in the Legal Requirement Review task.	If not completed yet, start the process to complete the legal requirement now. It must be completed before the end of the Post Verification stage.

Evaluation	The Evaluation Team reviews information in the Company Details page to confirm key aspects of your BIA, such as the assessment track and a preliminary score screen, to determine next steps. A more detailed description of this process can be found here	Complete other requests from the Evaluation team. These may include updating the BIA, and clarifying company structure as well as business model to confirm the company's path to certification	On average the Evaluation stage may take 2-4 weeks. It can take more depending on the complexity of the company or its industry.

Verification Queue	Once the company has completed the Verification Queue task(s) for Verification, B Lab will Assign an Analyst to the company.	Complete Operational Highlights View video instructions here	Once you complete this task, we will assign you to an analyst within 3 months depending on the length of the queue to begin the Verification stage.

The Verification process has 2 Rounds, with each round taking 1-2 weeks. The post-Verification stage may also take 1-2 weeks. Your Verification Analyst will provide specific deadlines for each round. See “due date” in each task.
Stage of Review Process	B Lab action items	Company action items	Timelines
Round 1
Verification	Your VerificationAnalyst customizes the Verification Report* as a part of the Review Preparation task.
	Schedule Review Call
	Conduct 1 hour Focused Review Call
	During and after the call, your analyst will highlight questions that require additional documentation or comments. Your analyst will post a request for follow-up information through the BIA.	Complete requested follow-ups – Log in the BIA Platform and attend to any notifications that require action in the Verification Report	Company Deadline: Typically within 1 week from the day your analyst makes the request for follow-ups
Round 2
Verification:	Review Follow-Ups Your Verification Analyst will review the follow-up information submitted in the previous round and verify more questions. If needed, the analyst may submit one more request for follow-ups to complete verification of all questions in the Verification Report.	Complete all final requests for follow-up information	Company Deadline: Typically 1 week from the day that the Verification Analyst requests Round 2 follow-ups
Verification	Submit company’s review for a Final Assessment Check, our internal peer review for quality. This process may trigger further follow up requests and answer adjustments
Final Steps and Post-Verification
	Complete Legal Requirement Review	Upload completed legal requirement
Post Verification	If the final verified score is above 80 points, Send B Corp Agreement.	Sign B Corp Agreement & Declaration of Interdependence and pay Certification fee, if prepayment is required
Review Closed	Once Post Verification steps are completed, you will receive an email welcoming you to the B Corp Community, which will officially conclude your certification process.	Complete Onboarding page in the platform and make announcement plans
Additional Round(s)
Improvement	If the final verified score is below 80 but above 75 points, the review progresses to the Improvement stage	Reference the Improvement reports and resources within the App and re-Submit after your company has made improvements that bring your score above 80 points!	Companies typically submit improvements for their Verification analysts’ review 30-90 days after this stage has begun.

* Verification will happen within the B Impact Assessment through the Verification Report which you can find under Reports, on the left-hand panel. This is the subset of questions that will be discussed during the verification process. The questions selected are all high scoring or requiring particular attention.

This icon indicates questions that are “Marked for Discussion, ” which only requires a comment to confirm the answer options
- Comments should be rationales, explanations, clarifications, and examples of why answer options selected apply to the company.
- Please provide comments with information that you would feel comfortable in backing up with documentation if you were requested. Comments are to be specific to each of the answer options selected - use bullet points and refer to which answer option they are intended to support, following the scheme:
  - A#1:....
  - A#2:...
  - etc
This icon indicates questions that are “Marked for Documentation,” which require a document to verify the answer options
- Documents should be policies, reports, web links, powerpoint presentations, agendas or even pictures of why answer options selected apply to the company.
- Only one document can be uploaded per comment. Please leave multiple comments to upload multiple documents.
- In your comments, indicate the pages within the uploaded document in which topics related to each answer option can be found and, if possible, provide a brief summary of what is stated in the document and why the document is relevant for the specific answer option selected.
- For these questions, additional Documentation Instructions appear in the comment section, please always use this to understand the document requirements and download templates when available.
- Be transparent about what documentation you have available. This can prevent unnecessary work, especially if you have a review score above 80 points.

This icon indicates that the answer options selected in the question have been verified
- By the end of this process, all questions in the Verification Report will need a Green Checkmark, signifying that they have been fully verified.
- In order to consider a question verified, each answer option selected needs to be verified. This means that supporting evidence in the form of comments or documentation has to be provided for each of the checkboxes selected within a question, not just one (or some) of them. Answer options for which no evidence/comment is provided will be deselected, assuming that the particular option does not fully apply to the company at this time.

Know where you are in the process by using the Reviews page :

Please check your Review page. Tasks will appear “active” and indicate if the pending item is waiting for action from you (the company name will appear) or B Lab. These tasks also indicate due dates.
Once the verification process begins, please note you will be expected to provide documentation and comments directly in the Verification Report. Ensure that you can dedicate 4-6 hours for the review process each round of the verification process. If you will not be able to dedicate this time in the next month and would like to schedule your verification process for a future date, please leave a comment in the Task “Operational Highlights.”

Please review this article for more tips to a successful review.

Thank you for your commitment in joining the B Corp community! Independent of the final result, your company has taken important steps on the journey of measuring, comparing and improving your company’s social and environmental performance.