Someone just asked you for carbon data you don’t have

It normally arrives as an email.

A bigger customer wants your carbon emissions. There’s a sustainability questionnaire sitting in your inbox. A lender has asked for figures. Or you’re halfway through a tender and suddenly there’s a section asking for Scope 1, Scope 2 and possibly some Scope 3 light data.

There’s just one problem.

You’ve never calculated it.

And now you’ve got a deadline.

First things first. You probably have more data than you think.

If you’ve never produced a carbon report before, it’s very easy to assume you haven’t been collecting the information you need.

In many cases, you have.

You just haven’t been calling it carbon data.

Your electricity bills contain your electricity consumption in kWh.

Your gas bills contain your gas consumption.

Fuel receipts and invoices show litres purchased.

Mileage records show business travel.

Refrigeration and HVAC service records can contain details of refrigerant use.

These are ordinary business records. You’ve probably been keeping them for completely different reasons.

But they’re also activity data.

And activity data can be turned into carbon emissions data.

So what is the person asking you for?

That depends on the request.

Scope 1 covers emissions from sources your business owns or controls. That can include things such as fuel burned in company vehicles, gas used on site and refrigerant losses.

Scope 2 covers emissions associated with the electricity your business buys and uses.

Scope 3 is often the reason SMEs are being asked for carbon data in the first place. It covers emissions across the value chain, and what you’re asked for will depend on the customer, lender or tender requirements in front of you.

The important thing is not to panic and start trying to calculate everything your business has ever touched.

Start with what they’ve actually asked for.

You don’t need to have been tracking this for years

This is another misconception I see.

A business gets asked for twelve months of carbon data and assumes that because it didn’t calculate its emissions twelve months ago, the information doesn’t exist.

But carbon emissions can be calculated retrospectively if the underlying records are still available.

If you’ve got the bills, invoices and records covering the reporting period, you’ve got somewhere to start.

The question becomes how you turn all of that paperwork into a usable emissions report before the deadline arrives.

This is where Green Citation comes in

Green Citation was built to read the records businesses already have.

You upload the documents. Green Citation extracts the activity data and applies the relevant UK Government greenhouse gas conversion factors for the reporting period.

Where the information is clearly structured, it’s processed automatically. Where it isn’t, or where something can’t be parsed from the documents, that’s what the Green Citation template documents are for. They give you a simple way to fill in any gaps so nothing gets missed.

That means we’re working from the actual kWh, litres, miles and kilograms recorded in your paperwork rather than estimating emissions from what you spent.

Every figure in the finished report is traceable back to its source.

No spreadsheets to build. No trying to work out which conversion factor applies to which fuel. No starting from scratch because nobody thought to create a carbon spreadsheet last January.

Use the records you’ve already got.

If you’ve got a backlog, that’s what the Catch-Up Plan is for.

The Catch-Up Plan was built for exactly this situation.

You need historical carbon data.

You haven’t been calculating it month by month.

And now somebody wants it.

The Catch-Up Plan covers up to 12 months of historical Scope 1, Scope 2 and Scope 3 Light reporting for a flat £395 one-off cost.

You provide the records for the period. Green Citation processes the activity data and produces the report.

The result is a traceable, audit-ready report built from your actual business records, delivered as a downloadable ZIP file containing PDF, CSV and JSON formats so you can use and reuse the data as needed.

And then don’t do this to yourself again

Once the immediate deadline is dealt with, there’s a much easier way to handle the next request.

Keep the reporting up to date.

Process the records as you go and build the carbon data month by month.

Then when a customer, lender, consultant or tender asks for it again, you’re not looking backwards through twelve months of paperwork wondering where to start.

You’ve already got it.

That’s the difference between carbon reporting being a fire drill and it simply becoming another bit of business admin.

But that’s for afterwards.

If somebody has asked you for carbon data you don’t have today, start with the paperwork.

You may already have most of what you need.