Accounting for Carbon Emissions
Related topics: Set Up, Conversions, Budgets, Sort Keys, Transactions, Classifications, Emission Groups, Usage Information, Profiled Accounts
What is Accounting for Carbon Emissions?
The increasingly drastic changes our climate is experiencing are becoming a huge challenge for our planet. It is accepted that climate change is mainly caused by the excessive emission of greenhouse gases created by human activity and that the unwanted alterations these cause are set to accelerate in future.
In this world of high Carbon usage and the associated world wide issue of global warming, individuals and organisations are being encouraged to
Account for their Carbon usage.
Reduce their Carbon emissions.
Offset their Carbon consumption.
It is likely that there will be a legal reporting requirement in the near future.
Access Accounts contains the highly innovative feature of Accounting for Carbon Emissions. Within this application you have the ability to calculate the amount of Carbon Emissions that result from various company related activities and to analyse this separately as well as associate it to the Nominal Account transactions.
How is this achieved?
Access Accounts is able to record the Carbon content of your transactions by converting the quantities you enter to a CO2 valuation using Carbon Conversion tables supplied by DEFRA (The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs).
These CO2 valuations are then stored for reporting purposes.
The Carbon content of transactions posted to any of your Profit and Loss Nominal Ledger accounts can be entered as the transactions are posted. For example: when you purchase heating oil, you simply select the emission classification for this type of fuel and enter the quantity purchased.
You can also enter Carbon usage transactions not based on transactions that are recorded through the Nominal Ledger. For example: you may wish to record an estimate of the carbon emission produced by all your staff on their journeys to work.
The Carbon Budgeting feature means that you can set a target for your Carbon usage and compare this to your actual consumption. Your next year's budget can then be created from the current budget but including a percentage reduction as you target reducing the Carbon Emissions produced by your company.
Access Accounts already contains the Carbon Conversion tables published by DEFRA, you just need to follow the How to set up Carbon Accounting topic to be able to use the feature.