As organisations make things or provide services, they will generate emissions either from their direct activities, such as delivering a package, or indirectly through their "value chain", such as purchasing stock.

Emissions contribute to climate change by affecting the makeup of gases in our atmosphere, causing the world to heat up, which leads to more extreme weather events amongst other things. You can read more on our blog about emissions scopes.

To calculate your carbon footprint, you need to understand your direct emissions and those of your value chain. There are a number of tools available to figure out what this number is. You can use the numbers generated to offset your operations and reduce your emissions over time.

Classically, this was done by consultants, but CarbonTrail wants to democratise this process and make it available to everyone. For those on Xero, CarbonTrail Starter is a free-of-charge solution that leverages CarbonTrail’s smart automation to calculate your business's carbon footprint.

Every exported report from CarbonTrail shows the factors used to reach the number, which can then be independently verified. The hybrid spend-based + activity-based model of calculation is an accepted method of generating an inventory.

Although some may claim otherwise, it is not possible to work out an “exact” carbon footprint for anything. Even the most accurate emissions calculations suffer from truncation errors – since the number of factors potentially influencing the carbon footprint of something is (literally) infinite, you always have to draw a line somewhere and sacrifice some amount of ‘accuracy’.

This means that, carbon footprinting exercises are therefore better or worse, as opposed to accurate or inaccurate.

Yes, we use industry-standard encryption and data protection methodologies to ensure that your sensitive financial data is looked after.

We use Amazon Web Services for hosting and data management, often using their managed services which are guaranteed by Amazon themselves.

Finally, only your organisation’s expenditure data is imported to CarbonTrail. We access your accounting data as read-only, and our staff do not have access to your data without your explicit consent.

Find out more about Security at CarbonTrail here.

Managing carbon emissions is a balancing act between identifying our impact and the contributors to it, then assessing the reduction opportunities. Many organisations establish an annual sustainability plan with initiatives to offset an assumed carbon impact. With CarbonTrail businesses can quantify their impact as well as their reduction efforts, making sustainability a part of everyday business. 

The first step is to know where your carbon emissions are coming from. If you’re seeing a significant portion of your monthly emissions coming from your power usage, then energy efficient bulbs or timer-switches could be viable options for you. When using CarbonTrail you can view your top-emitting categories and suppliers.

Yes! We have a special set-up in CarbonTrail for  Advisors as we realise that many small businesses have an accountant help them with their Xero account. Learn about how you can offer carbon accounting as a service here.