With the Supercritical Classifier, we convert your unique data into a bespoke, comprehensive, audit-ready carbon footprint.
Supercritical’s methodology is aligned with the GHG Protocol standard
Whatever the state of your data, it’s easy to get started
Perfect data can often be the enemy when it comes to the first steps of taking climate action, so we have built our system to get an accurate initial assessment of your company’s carbon footprint from just your accounting data. By analysing your spend across various categories (such as business travel, cloud computing, and staff food and drink) we can calculate emissions associated with each.
Layer on usage, activity and consumption data — and we’ll also take care of the elusive supplier and scope 3 data.
We’ll help you to find data relating to your offices, team travel, energy usage, employees and more — all without needing sensitive PII. Working with hundreds of tech companies has also enabled us to build up a huge database of supplier data. On the rare occasion you have a unique supplier we haven’t seen before, our experts will reach out to them directly and make it easy for them to factor into your calculation.
The Classifier is the software brains of our carbon accounting platform — our AI application crunches all your data to provide the most accurate footprint possible.
The Classifier has been trained on millions of data points over a number of years from both public, industry-standard sources and Supercritical’s vast proprietary database, to select the most precise and up to date scientifically-vetted emissions factors relevant to your specific to your business. This is all triple-checked by our expert climate team to ensure the highest-level of accuracy.
We support all major accounting platforms; Sage, QuickBooks, NetSuite, SAP, Xero, and more. Either connect through our one-click integrations, or export and upload your accounting data in CSV format.
We analyse all of your spend items and assign them to one of 50+ classifications. We support a broad range of categories across spend areas such as food and drink, consulting, marketing, travel, cloud computing, financial services, office suppliers, training, software spend, and more.
The Classifier uses our proprietary carbon emissions database to convert your various accounting, usage and supplier data into equivalent emissions, for example converting £-spend on Facebook ad marketing campaigns into emissions (measured in tonnes of CO2e).
You’ll be able to see your emissions breakdown as well as information by supplier and categories. Plus, you’ll get bespoke actions and recommendations that your business can take to reduce your footprint.
Supercritical’s methodology is aligned with the GHG Protocol standard, the standard developed by the World Resources Institute (WRI), and used by governments & cities all over the world as well as over 92% of Fortune 500 companies.
We begin by calculating a base year footprint; the total CO2e emissions released as part of a company's activities over the period of a specified year. Companies choose the base year as the earliest whole year for which they have reliable data. Calculating a base year footprint is necessary to set and track progress towards future emissions reduction goals.
Most business activities don’t have a direct measurement of the GHG emissions recorded for them. Instead, we use emission conversion factors to calculate the equivalent emissions created for activities. A number of governments & organisations create and maintain official GHG conversion factors, like the UK Government's Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy (BEIS) team2.
For example, converting a 15km taxi ride into the amount of CO2e emitted into the atmosphere, using the BEIS taxi km/ kg CO2e conversion factor (0.20369):
We use a comprehensive and progressive approach to mapping emissions, aiming to capture the majority of emission sources in a company’s sphere of influence. Emission sources such as home-working and pension investment are often overlooked, yet present a huge opportunity for positive influence.
Bojana is the Head of Climate at Supercritical, with 15 years of experience in sustainability. Environmental scientist by training with a PhD from the University of Cambridge, she is a highly-cited researcher with publications in Nature and responsibilities such as acting as an expert reviewer for the IPCC Special Report on Land use.
Bojana previously also worked in the private sector, an NGO, the UK government and advising the UNEP. She joined Supercritical inspired by Michelle and Aaron’s vision, and is responsible for managing carbon accounting, devising reduction strategies, and vetting our carbon removal offset supply.
Climate consultant
Climate consultant
Supercritical worked with Tide - one of the largest and fastest growing fintechs in the UK - to help them become the first fintech to remove 100% of its emissions with durable carbon removal.
Tide used Supercritical’s carbon accounting platform to measure their emissions, and purchased 3,711 tonnes of carbon dioxide removal through our platform.
As a regulated business, Tide also engaged a third party (Carbon Footprint Ltd) to audit the carbon footprint assessment completed by Supercritical.
The auditors reviewed and approved Supercritical’s methodology in accordance with the ‘ISO 14064 Part 3 (2019): Greenhouse Gases: Specification with guidance for the verification and validation of greenhouse gas statements’, and as a result certified Tide as a CO2e certified organisation under the Carbon Footprint Standard™.
Supercritical does not require PII in order to calculate your company’s carbon footprint.
We have an optional integration with Xero which is enabled, configured, and disabled by the customer. If enabled, we store a temporary access token which allows us to ingest specific customer accounting data. You can revoke the access token at any time.
In the Xero connection flow, our platform presents a checkbox list of all available account categories that can be imported. You are then able to customise what is/not imported before finalising the connection with Xero, so you have complete control over the data we access.
Supercritical’s customer database and file storage are hosted in Google Cloud Platform (europe-west-2, London), using 256-bit Advanced Encryption (AES-256). We do not transfer any customer data to third-parties/sub processors.
Customers have control at all times over the data being shared with Supercritical, and will be able to revoke e.g. Xero API access with Supercritical at will. No personally identifiable information (PII) is required or to be shared with Supercritical.
We are registered with the ICO as a Data Controller, and have a defined and internally shared security incident response plan.
All of our applications (both internal and public-facing) run as private serverless Google Cloud Run services, and access is secured by Google Cloud IAM permissions. Access to each service is restricted to only those services or employees that require it.
Yes. The Classifier can confidently analyse millions of accounting line items. We’ve served many large enterprise customers with millions of lines of accounting data, thousands of employees, and offices over a number of geographies.
Yes. The Classifier currently supports 133 different languages and all major currencies. We’ve served customers with accounting data in English, Italian, German, Danish, Estonian and more.
Yes. We’ve seen it all! From thousands of manually-scanned PDF invoices, to accounting data in different platforms, formats, and languages. Our job is to make your life easier, so as long as you can get your accounting data to us (regardless of format), we’ll be able to analyse it. The majority of accounting data we receive is in a CSV or similar format, but where necessary our Climate team uses internal tooling to clean and sanitise other data formats before inputting to the Classifier.
For most companies, the Classifier typically analyses up to 100% of their data automatically. In the rare instances where particular spend line items cannot be detected, the Classifier outputs an unclassified spend report which our Climate team manually checks. We will follow up with your Finance team if we have any clarifying questions at this point.
