Setting carbon accounting boundaries

Now that your consultancy is set up with company accounts and users, the next step is to begin the carbon accounting journey of your company accounts. First and foremost, you need to set up your temporal, organizational, and operational boundaries.

Reporting Periods

A reporting period is the time frame during which a set of emissions were produced. At least one reporting period is required to begin data collection. The periods should be all the same length of time. We recommend the use of years, but it is possible to report for different periods such as quarters or months if you so choose.

You can create new empty reporting periods or use the Duplicate Reporting Period option if you wish to use a previous period as a starting point.

Once you have completed the carbon footprint for a particular period, you will be able to lock the period and this will prevent the addition of new inventory data for that period.

Organizational Units

This page provides a tree structure for assigning data to the different subdivisions of an organization. This can be based on location, department, product, or whatever makes the most sense for the organization. By default, all emission data will be assigned to the automatically created top-level unit – the company.

You can up to four levels deep in your organizational tree to allow for more complex organizational structures.

Activity Categories

By default, activity categories are set up to align with those laid out in the GHGP. Clicking on the expand icon on a specific activity category will open a detailed view which contains information about the activity category, such as the category type, GHGP scope, and description. In this view you will also be able to include or exclude categories from your inventory. Please note that you need to provide inclusion and exclusion criteria for each category.

To create new activities while preserving the category type and scope classifications, you will need to make a copy of an existing activity. You will then be able to rename and move it between categories as needed. This can be useful if in your reporting, you want to for instance separate different fleet types but maintain the activity category type of mobile combustion.

You can also rename top-level elements. So instead of "Direct" and "Electricity", you could for instance use "Scope 1" and "Scope 2" instead if that is your preference.

Emission Factors

From the Emission Factors tab, you can change the default emission factor sources. This affects which source is used when applying emission factors in the Inventory using keyword and details (not manually selected). The preferred source can be set for each activity category type. A type can contain different activity cateories or even different parts of an activity category e.g. entries in Mobile Combustion might a have different preferred dataset depending on the keyword selected (goods vs people).

At the bottom of this view you will also find additional settings for:

Your preferred reporting method for electricity emissions
Toggling life cycle emissions on/off for scope 3 activity categories
Toggling on/off Radiative Forcing effects for air travel emissions

If you hover the info icon in-app you will get a more detailed explanation of each setting

Custom fields allow you to customize your Inventory to the specific data and workflow requirements of a Company Account. Custom fields have many uses, from managing approval flows to grouping data by product.

Custom Fields

Custom fields are defined in the Boundaries view under the Custom Fields tab. By clicking "Add new field", a new block will appear where you can name it. Afterwards, clicking the plus icon allows you to create options.

Currently we only allow for custom fields with dropdown inputs. This means that you will need to define the possible values for each field. Click the plus icon on the right side of the block where you just entered the name.

Business Metrics

Business metrics can be used to see a company's emissions relative to a another variable. For example, you might want to see the emissions of a company's office buildings relative to their number of full time employees, or the emissions of a factory relative to its output.

Three metrics are provided for all companies by default - Employees, Gross output, and Sales. You are free to edit or delete them if they are not applicable for the company. By hovering the block "Business Metrics", you will reveal a plus icon. Clicking this will create a new business metric for you to edit.

By expanding it, you can edit the label and unit of the metric. You can either choose from a list of preset options or you can create an entirely custom metric. You can edit, duplicate and delete metrics in this view as well but please note that you can only delete metrics that has no associated inventory lines.