With the Supercritical Classifier, we convert your accounting data into a comprehensive, audit-ready carbon footprint.
Supercritical’s methodology is aligned with the GHG Protocol standard
Supercritical is a carbon accounting platform that helps businesses measure their climate impact.
We use your company’s accounting data to calculate your carbon footprint, analysing your spend across various categories (such as business travel, cloud computing, and staff food and drink) to calculate emissions associated with each.
The Classifier is the software brains of our carbon accounting platform – an AI application that analyses your company’s financial data in order to organise and convert your spend into equivalent company-related emissions.
The Classifier has been trained on millions of financial data points over a number of years, and has up to 100% automated coverage of accounting data.
We support all major accounting platforms; Sage, QuickBooks, NetSuite, SAP, Xero, and more. You export your accounting data in a CSV format and upload to our platform, and the Classifier does the rest. If you use Xero, we also support a one-click integration.
It sorts each spend item by multiple classes (e.g. travel/taxis, food and drink/takeaway, etc). The Classifier supports analysing a broad range of spend categories including food and drink, consulting, marketing, travel, cloud computing, financial services, office suppliers, training, and software spend.
The Classifier uses our proprietary carbon emissions database to convert your various spend-based activities into equivalent emissions, for example converting £-spend on Facebook ad marketing campaigns into emissions (measured in tonnes of CO2e).
This includes emissions breakdown information by supplier and accounting categories.
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.
