How to use Position Green's Carbon Management Product (Next-gen)

Purpose of this guide

Position Green’s Carbon Management accelerates the journey from data collection to decarbonization, turning your carbon data into strategically relevant insights, not just a compliance checkbox.

This guide gives you a simple step-by-step overview of how to get started and how to use the product effectively.

Step 1: Set up your organization

Why is this step important?

This step helps ensure that emissions can be calculated, reviewed, and reported in the right way. The goal is to make sure the platform reflects how your organization is managed, how you want to report, and how data is consolidated in your inventory. 

What do you do in this step?

You will need to define:

• Basic settings: language, currency, units, number formats, materiality threshold

• Organizational structure: legal entities, business units, sites or locations

• Organizational boundaries and consolidation approach

• Users, roles, and accesses

How do you do it?

This step happens in the “Settings” tab in the bottom left corner, and should be the first thing you do when you enter the product for the first time. 

How is this maintained over time?

Basic settings and user roles can be changed at will. 

For organizational structure, organizational boundaries, and consolidation approach changes will impact the GHG inventory. In Position Green’s Carbon Management, the main goal is not reporting, but being able to reflect the real situation of the company so that decarbonization can be modeled reliably. This means that historical inventories are kept as up-to-date as possible with changes in the organizational structure.

A classic example is mergers and acquisitions (M&As). If a company acquires another company, they can add the new company to their organizational hierarchy. If the acquired company is already a customer of Position Green, their historical inventories will be requested and added to the new organizational structure. If they are not a Position Green customer, the historical inventory can be uploaded to ensure consistency. Similarly, if Company A divests in Company B, Company B’s historical inventories will be separated from Company A’s organizational structure. 

Once an organizational structure is changed, the complete historical inventory will also change accordingly. However, this does not mean that the data is lost. Position Green keeps detailed change logs so that all changes can be reverted back to the original if needed. In addition, users can create snapshots of their reported inventories so these are archived for future reference, while their carbon data is updated in the ongoing carbon management system. Read more about Snapshots in section X (link).

Step 2: Add your data sources

Once your structure and boundaries are defined, you can start adding data.

Why is this step important?

Position Green’s Carbon Management is designed to handle large amounts of data from different data sources. We call this a customer’s data ecosystem. Connecting or adding data from your ecosystem will determine how you work with your carbon footprint. For the best experience, we recommend bringing the data as close as possible by sending data to the platform via our API or by integrating your systems.

The goal is to collect the best available data while making gaps and assumptions visible.

What do you do in this step?

First, you get an overview of your internal data ecosystem by asking questions, such as:

• Where does our activity data come from?

• Where do our invoices live?

• Which ERP system(s) do we use?

Then, you decide which data sources you want to include and how you want to include them, whether that be by sending the data to our API, integrating your systems, uploading files, or through manual inputs. You do not need to rely on only one data source or only one way of ingesting the data. In most cases, you will combine several data sources and ingestion approaches to build a complete emissions inventory.

Examples of data sources: invoices, ERP or finance systems, utility systems, excel files, pdf documents, supplier data, etc.

How do you do it?

Open the “Data” tab in the left navigation menu. Within the data tab, you have the choice of:

• Adding an integration

  • Integrate with us, using our API documentation

  • Set up an integration with our off-the-shelf integrations (no additional cost)

  • Get in touch if you want to set up an integration outside our standard offering (incurs an additional cost based on a the scope of the work)

• Uploading your data, examples include:

  • Excel files with activity data

  • PDF invoices with our Activity Capture feature (link to more information)

The most common forms of integrations are: 1) Financial accounting from your ERP system, or 2) Operational data from e.g. your energy management system. To set up an integration, follow our integration guidances.

Account settings

Especially for ERP integrations and spend estimations, not all data is relevant or generate any emissions. Examples includes tax, inter-company transactions, and accounted periodization. Position Green uses financial account codes to exclude, include, and place data in the right Scope category, in addition to the context of the accounted payment, the supplier and the invoice line. We have already defined a handful of standard account rules for country-specific accounting standards (IFRS, NGAAP, BAS 2020 etc), but you can also create and maintain your own account settings. 

How is this maintained over time?

If you set up an integration, the data will flow from your system to Position Green at the interval you have defined, e.g. once per month when the financial accounting has been closed. In the Data tab, under Integrations, you will be able to monitor the data coming in by checking the sync log on the right side, see error messages, see the last time data came in, etc.

If you upload data, you will see a log of all uploads and be notified with error messages if something goes wrong. 

Step 3: Validate and reconcile your data

After data has been uploaded or connected, review the data before finalizing calculations.

Why is this step important?

Although most data you ingest will have gone through some verification process already (e.g. financial accounting data, invoices, etc.), there may be a need to validate that the data has come in correctly and been handled correctly by us. Usually, there will be a bit of work on this the first time you add data, but each validation decision is saved and applied automatically the next time data is ingested. Therefore, this is an important step to ensure the integrity of the data used for your inventory, making it easier to audit, and to reduce the workload over time.

The goal is not to have perfect data from day one, but to understand the quality of your data and improve it over time.

What do you do in this step?

Next-gen is designed to help identify areas that need attention, so you can improve quality before reporting. Therefore, each time data enters the platform, the system will automatically tell you where validation is needed. You can also find validation jobs visible in the dashboards.

Validating data involves automated workflows including, but not limited to:

• Missing data

• Duplicates

• Unusual values

• Low-confidence matches

• Incorrect categories

• Data that needs additional evidence

• Data that should be excluded from the inventory

How do you do it?

Data validation happens at the point of data ingestion in the “Data” tab. Validation jobs can also be accessed through the dashboards. Most of the validation work occurs as a list of information where you as the user are asked to verify if it looks correct, adjust if needed, and approve when done. 

How is this maintained over time?

The data model in Carbon Management is designed to remember user actions so that adjustments to data categorizations are remembered. This reduces the data validation process over time. 

Step 4: Take a first look at your emissions inventory

Once data is ingested and validated, the emissions have already been calculated and you have your first draft of your GHG inventory. Now, you can navigate to “Carbon accounting” to take a look at how it has been organized, explore hotspots, and note down where data quality needs improvement. In the “GHG emissions” view, you can see your inventory divided into Scope 1, 2, and 3, in line with the GHG Protocol. In the “Supplier” view, you can see your inventory organized per supplier. [Additional views coming soon]

Why is this step important?

Now you can see how your data looks in your inventory and plan your next steps so that your inventory is optimized to your preference. 

What do you do in this step?

Click around in the different scopes and scope categories, to familiarize yourself with how your data is organized. Note down changes you want to make in the different views.

Changes that can be made: 

• Change emission factor

• Change supplier

• Collaborate: Give access to colleagues and add comments

This is also where you can explore the analytics available in our standard dashboards, such as:

• Largest emission sources

• Suppliers with high emissions

• Categories with poor data quality

• Areas where spend-based calculations are still used

• Activities with high reduction potential

• Parts of the inventory that need better evidence

These overviews help you prioritize where to improve data and where to take action.

How is this maintained over time?

All changes you make to your inventory will be remembered for future reference.

Step 5: Create collections

In Position Green’s Carbon Management, emissions are organized in collections. Each collection allows you to collect emissions across scopes that relate to the same operational part of your business and that have the same decarbonization potential. 

One example of a collection is “Car fleet”. Although the main emissions are associated with Scope 1.1: Mobile combustion, in reality emissions from cars span across Scope 1, 2, and 3. Scope 2 for electric vehicles, and Scope 3 for upstream fuel production emissions. By creating a collection for these emissions, we can see these emissions under one umbrella and create actions that cover the complete footprint of a company’s car fleet.

Why is this step important?

Collections are important for two reasons:

1. Operational relevance: Collections allow you to organize your emissions in ways that reflect your specific company’s operations, rather than be forced to work only in the GHG Protocol framework. With increased operational relevance you can improve collaboration with internal stakeholders that are not GHG Protocol experts, and you can improve your company’s ability to implement reduction measures since these are related to your operations, rather than to a scope category. This capability will be further improved with the “Operations” view. 

2. Decarbonization context: Collections also allow you to provide better context on what your emissions actually relate to. If you were to simply log “Diesel”, our Decarbonization module would not know if that diesel relates to a car, to a generator, or to a heavy duty truck. Collections add context to your emissions that is essential for high quality decarbonization suggestions.

What do you do in this step?

In the “GHG emissions” view, you review the data within each scope category and then you create cross-category collections. Each collection can be given a name, description, labels, comments, and attachments. 

In most cases, there will be some automatically generated collections. In this case, these collections should be reviewed and enriched with more context. 

How do you do it?

Creating collections is easy, you simply mark the emissions you want and click “Add to collection”. Then you can name your new collection, and keep adding emissions throughout your inventory. 

The challenge is to create the right collections for your specific needs.

How is this maintained over time?

There are many parts of this workflow that are automated over time. Once new data is ingested and identified as identical or very similar to previous data, the new data will be added to the same collections as the previous data. 

Step 6: Add data manually

If there is data that has not been ingested in Step 2, you can add that data manually. It is also possible to skip step 2 and only add data manually, although this would entail a very tedious data collection process and data punching with potential for human error. Therefore, we recommend going through Step 2 before, if necessary, adding data manually. 

Why is this step important?

Although your data ecosystem likely contains the vast majority of data needed for your GHG inventory, there are some scope categories that are likely not represented. Usually, these are the downstream Scope 3 categories, such as employee commuting. Therefore, we have the option to add this data manually to ensure a complete inventory. 

What do you do in this step?

You manually add the data needed to perform an activity-based emission calculation. This includes adding consumption (e.g. liters of fuel or kWh of electricity or mass of material) and choosing an appropriate emission factor from our library. 

How do you do it?

These are the steps to adding data manually:

• Open an existing collection or create a new collection. Within the collection, click “Add consumption”. 

• Add the consumption data (e.g. liters of fuel).

• Review the suggested emission factor by clicking “Details”. If you want a different emission factor, you can choose a different variant in the list in the “Details” window.

• Choose the period the consumption is for, whether that is for a specific period / data range, or a specific date. 

• If relevant (for Group users), specify the business unit.

How is this maintained over time?

Step 7: Add labels, comments and attachments

Why is this step important?

This step is important to ensure transparency and traceability, both to strengthen the integrity of the final results, and to support the auditability of the inventory. In addition, this information can help enrich the context in the inventory and make it easier to slice and dice the results in the end.

What do you do in this step?

Here you add any type of documentation to support each data point. For example, a note on where the data was gathered from, who was involved, and other relevant information. You can also upload attachments, such as reports, excel files with calculations, and anything else you find relevant or that your auditors require. 

Note: if your data comes in via integrations or Activity Capture, the traceability is automated. For spend-based calculations, data can be traced back to the data sync between your ERP system and the Position Green platform. For Activity Capture, the invoices will be added as attachments wherever possible.

How do you do it?

• Open a collection and click the comment-symbol, this opens a window to add all the information needed

• In this window, you can add description, labels, comments, and attachments. You can also see all activity data and transactions within the collection.

How is this maintained over time?

Step 8: Engage suppliers and improve data

[Guidance coming soon]

Step 9: Create reduction actions

[Guidance coming soon]

Step 10: Reporting and audit documentation

[Guidance coming soon]

Good practice tips

Start with the best data you have available. You can improve quality over time.

Prioritize the areas that matter most. Focus first on large emission sources, important suppliers, and categories with poor data quality.

Document your assumptions. If data is estimated or incomplete, make sure this is clearly recorded.

Use data quality as a management tool. Data quality is not only important for reporting; it helps you decide where to improve.

Move from measurement to action. The purpose of Next-gen is not only to calculate emissions, but to help you understand what to do next.