The N/A Score

Even though the B Impact Assessment is customized to a company’s size, sector, and geographic locations, there may be some circumstances where questions are “not applicable” to a particular company. Typically this means that the question is assessing an impact that is not relevant to the particular circumstances of your company—for example the topic of facilities management in the Environment section would not be a relevant impact for a virtual office company.

When a question is “Not Applicable”, the points available in that question are redistributed to the remaining questions in that Impact Area rather than your company earning no points. The “N/A Score” that appears on your company’s B Impact Report is the equivalent points earned based on this redistribution. An N/A Score might be triggered by selecting the “N/A” answer option in a particular question, or applied automatically when questions are disabled by a gating question in the assessment.

Companies should only answer Not Applicable if the particular description in the Not Applicable answer option is true, otherwise, a company should answer None of the Above or Don’t Know.

Here are the most common questions that might cause a company to see an N/A score:

• “Type of Facilities” – Companies that indicate their primary facilities are “virtual or home offices” will disable several questions about facilities in the Environment impact area.

• “Land Under Cultivation” and “Sourcing Ag Products” – For companies in the Agricultural/Growers sector, these yes or no questions in the Environment Impact Area Introduction may disable questions about land management and agricultural sourcing if they are not applicable.

• “Majority of Purchases Physical Product or Services” – For companies in the Service with Significant Environmental Footprint sector, indicating that a majority of purchases are from “services or non-physical products (like software)” will disable questions about physical product sourcing in the Environment impact area.

• Individual or Family Living Wage Questions – If a living wage benchmark is not available in a company’s country of operations, they should select the “N/A” option in these questions.

• Hourly Worker Questions – There are some questions in the Workers impact area specific to “hourly” workers. If a company does not have hourly workers, they should select the “N/A” option in these questions.

How N/A Score is Calculated

Questions that trigger an N/A score calculation will allocate credit based on your company’s average score within that same impact area. For example, the N/A score calculated for operating in a virtual/home office will be based on the percent of points that your company earned in all of the other Environment Questions. This percentage will then be multiplied by the total worth of the questions deemed not applicable to produce an N/A Score.

Example: A company has a  virtual or home office, which disabled five questions in the Environment section worth a total of 10.0 points. This company is  earning 50% of the total points available in the remainder of the Environment questions (excluding the questions that are disabled). The N/A Score would then be calculated as: 50% * 10.0 points = 5.0 points.