5 ways Avarni is better than a carbon accounting spreadsheet

‍Carbon accounting can be a time-consuming and complex task, but with the right tools, it doesn't have to be. Avarni is a powerful, user-friendly carbon management platform that simplifies the process of carbon accounting. In this article, we’ll share the five reasons why Avarni is better than a traditional carbon accounting spreadsheet when it comes to tracking your emissions and identifying hotspots in your supply chain.

How emissions are calculated

Before we jump into the ways that Avarni is better than a carbon accounting spreadsheet, let’s quickly review how emissions are typically measured:

• Activity-based data is the actual detailed GHG assessment for every activity in your value chain. While this method can be very accurate, it can also be tedious and time-consuming to collect this vast data from all your suppliers.
• ‍Spend-based data takes the financial value of a purchased good or service and multiplies it by an emission factor. This returns an estimate of emissions per financial unit. While it is a rough proxy for activity-based data, it is a useful way to begin to measure your organization’s carbon emissions, with the goal of eventually receiving consistent activity-based data from your entire supply chain.

Avarni combines both activity-based and spend-based data in its carbon emissions analysis, providing a comprehensive view of your carbon footprint, and allowing you to quickly identify hotspots in your supply chain and begin to take appropriate action.

How Avarni is better than a carbon accounting spreadsheet

Now that we’ve reviewed how Avarni calculates carbon emissions, let’s review how it does it better than a spreadsheet:

1. Streamlined data entry

Traditionally, companies have used spreadsheet-based approaches to identify and manage their carbon emissions. This typically involves manually entering data into an Excel spreadsheet and running calculations to generate reports. While this method is relatively low-cost, it is a time-consuming exercise. Furthermore, it provides a limited view of an organization's emissions, and is not as secure or reliable as a software-based solution such as Avarni.

Avarni simplifies the process of data entry in a few ways:

• Avarni’s AI-driven platform lets you import your data into the system no matter what the structure or taxonomy of your input data. This proprietary world-first natural language processing AI — and completely automated solution — makes it easy to import your data and can save you weeks or even months preparing and importing data.‍
• Avarni integrates with over 1,000 leading software platforms including Coupa, Microsoft Power BI, NetSuite, Oracle, Salesforce, SAP, ServiceNow, and Xero. Leveraging secure API integrations to these trusted third-parties can save you significant time and effort in gathering and organizing your spend and activity data for emissions identification.‍
• Avarni lets you invite suppliers to measure and report their emissions for free. By allowing suppliers to easily calculate their own emissions from Scope 1-3, and set their own SBTis, you create a complete picture of your own value chain emissions. This vendor engagement feature ensures the data being reported is secure and consistently reported, and allows you to work together towards your decarbonization goals and targets.

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2. Automated calculations & reporting

Avarni’s comprehensive calculation methodology and data collation from your supply chain ensures that all 15 categories within Scope 3 emissions are identified. All emissions calculations are done automatically, eliminating the need to manually calculate data or create complex (and potentially error-prone) formulas within a carbon accounting spreadsheet. From there, you can easily create detailed emissions reports for all your stakeholders, and export data for reporting purposes under standards and frameworks such as CDP, GHG Protocol, GRI and TCFD. In addition, you can publish your carbon emissions report on a hosted webpage for full transparency. These automated reporting features can provide significant time and cost savings for your organization. Our customers have reported that, on average, Avarni reduces the time they spend on manual emissions tracking by 93% and cost by 305%.

3. Visualization

Avarni's UI is designed to be intuitive and user-friendly, so you can quickly and easily understand your organization’s emissions data. You can easily drill down into your emissions data by scope, category, emissions, country, or supplier. And with powerful visualizations such as pie charts, bar charts, and line graphs, you can gain valuable insights into your emissions data and make informed decisions in regards to your decarbonization plans.
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4. Forecasting

Unlike a carbon accounting spreadsheet, Avarni makes it easy to forecast what your future emissions will look like under an unlimited number of different models. Avarni's AI-powered forecasting allows you to calculate and compare the future emissions of your supply chain under various scenarios. You can set hypothetical vendor SBTis, or add parameters for a renewable energy transition in a particular geography, and understand the financial cost of each scenario by setting carbon prices. AI-powered forecasting also ensures that vendor SBTis are automatically included in the base scenario, saving you time and effort. This powerful feature allows you to compare the carbon performance of suppliers in the same categories to each other, and create a carbon reduction plan that aligns your suppliers' targets with your own net zero targets.
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5. Research & analysis

Your value chain’s carbon footprint is constantly changing. With each vendor reporting various results and targets throughout the year, it can be difficult to stay ahead of the data and to understand what it means for your organization. Avarni's AI-driven web crawler makes collecting sustainability information about any company effortless. Avarni provides a live news feed of the sustainability initiatives of your largest suppliers, automatically collecting SBTis, reported emissions, and key sentences on topics such as net zero, ESG, etc. This reduces the need for manual research, and helps you quickly review and guide the emissions targets of your vendors, customers and competitors.
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Replace your carbon accounting spreadsheet with Avarni

Avarni replaces the traditional carbon accounting spreadsheet, enabling users to collaborate with each other and greatly improving the process of emissions management. It provides you with a range of powerful features such as streamlined data entry, automated emissions calculations and reporting, visualizations, forecasting, and research and analysis tools that can save time and effort and accelerate your organization’s decarbonization journey.

Get in touch today to learn more about Avarni and how we can help with your carbon accounting and emissions management.

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