Throughout the 50-year history of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Act, management choices have predominantly drawn on biophysical rather than socio-economic data. A reason for this is the absence of centralised socio-economic data collected systematically and purposefully, making the application for environmental management decision-making challenging or impractical. Drawing on an extended ecosystem accounting framework created to assemble the many values held by people for the GBR, we present and test an Ecosystem Service Value Chain (hereafter, Value Chain) as a tool for organising and prioritising socio-economic information. The Value Chain represents an opportunity to integrate the socio-economic with the biophysical data because it links the biophysical stages and processes involved in the delivery of ecosystem services, from the different ecosystems of the Great Barrier Reef to the ultimate beneficiaries, including government, industries, households, and Traditional Owners. In this way it provides a practical avenue to understand who benefits from what, as well as how the benefit can be quantified or qualified. This approach also provides a systematic way to understand data quality and identify existing data gaps. We reflect on where this approach worked well and where it did not and discuss possible pathways for further improvements and applications.