Estimating Your Business's Carbon Footprint in Under 10 Minutes

For Businesses with Under $5M in Annual Expenses

Step 1: Criteria

• Use Xero for Account Management: Make sure your business is accounting through Xero and you have ‘Standard’ or ‘Advisor’ access to your account. This is very essential for the compatibility with Cogo to estimate your carbon footprint.

Step 2: What You Need

• Company Description: Write a short company profile. This description will be used to improve your profile in the Cogo app.

Step 3: Open Xero Marketplace

• Access Xero App Store: Visit apps.xero.com/nz. There are several applications on this platform, such as Cogo, which offers carbon management tools and footprint calculation.

Step 4: Search for Cogo

• Find Cogo: Using the search function within the marketplace, you find Cogo, an app dedicated to carbon management solutions designed for measuring and managing your carbon footprint.

Step 5: Connect Cogo to Xero

• Integrate Cogo with Xero: Link Cogo to your Xero account. This integration is crucial to the automatic calculation of your carbon footprint based on financial data. The app then analyses your spending by contact  and classifies it into several industries, such as fashion, grocery, and insurance and calculates how much carbon is emitted for each transaction.

Step 6: Categorise Unrecognised Spending

• Manual Categorisation: Cogo automatically categorises most spending. But for any unknown items, you should manually categorise them in the Cogo. This is actually quite addictive trying to get to 100%!
• Tip: Though striving for precision, keep in mind that this is an estimate to help identify the high carbon-intensive regions.

Step 7: Understand Your Footprint

• Footprint Calculation by Cogo: Cogo uses the default local emission factors multiplied by your spending to calculate your footprint. These are the average carbon emissions per unit (think KM or Hotel night)  in the different sectors of the economy.
• Limitations: Note that Cogo may inflate in some cases, such as flights or deals with companies that have already neutralised their emissions.
• Actionable Insight: When it comes to large activities such as travel, it is advisable to combine the spending data with specific activity data like kilometres travelled or electricity and gas consumption.

Step 8: Review and Act on Recommendations

• Cogo's Recommendations: Analyse the proposed actions by Cogo and choose realistic ones that correspond with high carbon spending. Despite not being as targeted as the recommendations provided by a consultant, these activities will direct your first phase of reduction and money saved by using Cogo can be money spent on action!
• Set a Carbon Goal: Set an organisational carbon reduction objective.

Step 9: Publish and Share

• Website Integration: Make a subsection or a page on your site about the following:some text
  • Your identity and mission: Your identity and dedication to sustainability.
  • Your carbon footprint: Make your Cogo profile public for transparency.
  • Improvement efforts: Provide photos and descriptions showing the activities you engage in for sustainability.
  • Ongoing emission activities: Recognise the aspects of your business that continue to release carbon and look for possible ways you can reduce.

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Through these steps, the companies can quickly calculate their carbon footprint to support the targeted reduction measures and environmental initiatives like native forest rewilding. This process is not only for compliance but also to be a positive force for the Earth and the community.

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