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Organize environmental accounts

  • 7 min.

Environmental accounts define your company’s areas of activity, and organize the collection of emissions data. You have a large amount of flexibility in organizing the accounts to suit the nature and needs of your company, and your requirements for tracking and reporting emissions data.

From the Role Center, navigate to Environmental Accounts, and then select from the default environmental account types. These environmental account types are designed to cover all business operations and the whole value chain for carbon accounting purposes.

Continia Sustainabilty Role Center menu Enviro Accounts

The main list page of each environmental account type will give you a summary of the different types of emissions, and their overall impact.

Organize environmental accounts on the list page

You can organize environmental accounts in various ways that best suit how your company needs to track and analyze carbon emissions data. You have the flexibility to create broad high-level accounts, or to be more specific and granular. Similar to a chart of accounts in financial accounting, you can organize your environment accounts with numbered sequences of accounts.

Note

The example image from the Purchased Goods and Services environmental account type, shows all Construction Material accounts with account numbers beginning 1. The Heading account begins the sequence at 10000, and the Total account concludes the sequence at 19999. Similarly, the Electrical Items subcategory takes the sequence from 30000 through to 39999. Sequences should have space for you to add accounts in the future as it becomes necessary.

Enviro Accounts Purch Goods and Services List page

You can embed sub-categories within a sequence by using the Account Types for Begin-Total and End-Total. To display this added structure in the list, you can use embedded indent individual accounts from the action Home > Indent Accounts.

Note

The second example image shows the Business Travel environmental account type with a sub-category for economy class flights with account numbers ranging from 20100 through to 20199.

Enviro Accounts Bus Travel Economy sub-category

As well as the account numbers and names, each list page shows an overview of other information such as:

  • the Net Change (kg CO2e) and Balance (kg CO2e) fields, which display current data
  • Data Source Table and Filters, which display where the account sources its data from within Business Central

Use the New action to create an additional account, or the Edit List action to create a number of accounts quickly.

To set up or view a specific account, click on the account number.

Work with environmental account cards

Different types of environmental account cards have different options available for set up and configuration. For example, accounts for vehicle usage require information about fuel type, and accounts for waste require information about disposal or treatment methods. Nevertheless, all environmental account cards have some common fields.

The General FastTab gives you some key controls and information about the account, and includes:

  • Number and Name of the account
  • Account Type, with options for standard Posting accounts or accounts that create category structures on the main page, such as Heading and Total
  • Balance (kg CO2e), which displays current data and is not editable
  • Blocked, which allows you to prevent a field accepting new postings
  • Last Date Modified, which displays the latest date at which the environmental account card was modified

The Data Source FastTab allows you to set up the source of data for this environmental account, and includes:

  • Data Source Table specifies the main source of the data
  • Data Source Table Filters allow you to further define and restrict the data that is linked to this account

The Emissions Factors FastTab allows you to specify which database and factors should be used for calculating emissions for this account, and includes:

  • Emission Factor Set, where you can choose from the list of Emission Factor databases, such as Defra
  • Emission Category and Code, where you can specify which factor to use from the chosen database. You can specify multiple factors if different metrics are available for the same factor.
  • Fixed Emission Factor, which allows you to choose a specific emission factor to be used in calculations
  • Number of Emission Factors, which displays the number of different units of measurement available according to your selections in the earlier fields
Enviro Accounts Purch Goods and Services Concrete examples

Scenario

Ester from Cronus is setting up and organizing environmental accounts. She needs to:

  • Create subcategories of environmental accounts
  • Select the data sources for individual environmental accounts
  • Set up the emissions factor calculation methods for individual environmental accounts

Other resources