You've uploaded your chart of accounts and your general ledger. SCOP3™ has read them and done a first pass. This page explains what it did, what it's now asking you for, and how you know when you're done.
It's written for the person who keeps the books, not for a carbon expert. You don't need to know anything about greenhouse gas accounting to work through it.
How SCOP3™ works out your emissions
The short version
Emissions aren't something you can read off a meter for most of your business. They're calculated. Every calculation follows the same shape:
how much of something you used × how much carbon that something releases = your emissions
The second half of that, how much carbon a litre of diesel or a kilowatt-hour of electricity releases, is settled science, published by governments and standards bodies. SCOP3™ holds those figures and keeps them current. You never have to supply them.
The first half is the part only your business knows. That's the whole job in front of you, and it's what everything below is about.
Why we start from your ledger
Most small and mid-sized businesses don't have meter readings, fuel logs, or a file of every invoice. What they do have, always, is a general ledger: a complete record of what the business spent money on.
That record is more useful than it looks. If you spent $4,200 with a fuel distributor, you bought a quantity of fuel. We may not know the exact litres from the ledger alone, but we know roughly what fuel cost that year, so we can work back to a defensible estimate.
This is called a spend-based calculation. It's an accepted method, used widely, and it has one large advantage: your ledger is already complete. Nothing is missing from it, because your bookkeeping wouldn't balance if it were.
The trade-off, stated honestly
A spend-based estimate is an estimate. Prices move, suppliers differ, and a single invoice can mix fuel with delivery charges. The number is defensible but it carries a margin.
So SCOP3™ works on a ladder. Wherever you can give it something better than spend, it uses the better thing:
| What you give it | What it does | How strong |
|---|---|---|
| A source document: an invoice, a fuel receipt, a utility bill | Reads the actual quantity off the document and uses that | Strongest |
| A direct entry: kilometres driven, litres purchased, a refrigerant charge you know | Uses the figure you supplied | Strong |
| Spend alone, the ledger line and no other information | Estimates the quantity from the amount spent | Acceptable |
| Nothing yet, the line is flagged and unresolved | Contributes zero | Not counted |
That last row is the one to watch. An unresolved line doesn't get a rough number. It gets no number at all. We'd rather show you a visible gap than quietly invent a figure and let it flow into your report.
Why some lines say "Attention Required"
When SCOP3™ reads your ledger, it sorts each account into a category: fuel, electricity, vehicles, refrigerant, or nothing to do with emissions. Most sort cleanly. Some genuinely can't be sorted without you.
A line is flagged when the ledger is ambiguous, not when the software is confused. Some examples.
An HVAC contractor's invoice. The vendor name says "heating and cooling". The invoice might be a filter change, or it might be two kilograms of refrigerant released into the atmosphere. Those are very different numbers, and nothing in the ledger tells them apart.
An equipment purchase. A new chiller might arrive pre-charged with refrigerant, which counts, or empty, which doesn't.
A general "repairs and maintenance" account that sometimes carries fuel and sometimes doesn't.
These aren't errors. They're questions only the business can answer, and answering them is what the next section is about.
Expect a lot of them on a first run. A ledger with hundreds of climate-related lines will produce a long list, and that's normal. The list is meant to be worked down, not emptied in one sitting.
Your score, and what it's made of
SCOP3™ gives you a single score, but two separate things drive it.
Coverage is how much of your relevant spend has been resolved. Every account that looks emissions-related and is still sitting unresolved pulls this down, because those dollars are currently contributing nothing to your total.
Evidence quality is how strong the basis is for what has been resolved. A line backed by an invoice scores higher than the same line estimated from spend, because the quantity is measured rather than inferred.
The two work in that order. Coverage first, evidence second. A complete calculation built on estimates is more useful and more defensible than a partial one built on perfect invoices, because the partial one is simply missing emissions.
What to do to improve your score
Work down this list. It's ordered by how much each action moves the number.
1. Work down the "Attention Required" list
This is the biggest one. These lines are contributing zero right now. Each one you resolve adds real emissions to your total and closes a coverage gap.
Go to your flagged items and, for each one, tell SCOP3™ what it is. Usually that's one of three things.
Assign the account to an asset. If a group of accounts all relate to the same piece of equipment or the same vehicle, point them at it once. Every line in those accounts is then handled together, so you don't resolve them one at a time. This is the fastest way to move a long list.
Upload the document. If you have the invoice, attach it. SCOP3™ reads the actual quantity off it and that quantity replaces the estimate.
Mark it as not emissions-related. If the account has nothing to do with fuel, power, vehicles or refrigerant, say so. This is a real answer and it improves your score, because the gap closes: there was nothing in it.
Sort the list by dollar value and start at the top. A single large flagged account can matter more than fifty small ones put together. Don't leave things flagged because you're unsure, either: an approximate answer counts, an unanswered flag doesn't.
2. Upload source documents for your largest spend lines
Once coverage is good, this is where quality gains come from. You don't need every invoice, and you shouldn't try to find them all.
Sort by spend and work from the top. The ten largest lines usually account for most of your emissions, and improving those ten changes your number far more than chasing fifty small ones. A $40 receipt is not worth the twenty minutes.
The count of documents you've reviewed matters in its own right. It's the plainest evidence that a person looked at the underlying records rather than accepting whatever came out of the ledger, and it's one of the first things an auditor will ask about. Two hundred lines with forty reviewed documents behind the big ones reads very differently from two hundred lines with none.
3. Correct any misclassified accounts
If you see an account in the wrong category, a courier account read as vehicle fuel when you don't own the vehicles, change it. Corrections stick, and they apply to future periods too.
4. Fill in what only you know
Some things never appear in a ledger in a usable form: distance driven, a refrigerant top-up quantity a technician told you verbally, fuel you bought before the period opened. Where SCOP3™ offers a field for it, enter it. A figure you're confident in beats an estimate.
What won't help
Re-uploading your ledger. It doesn't create new information, and it can undo work you've already done.
Hunting down every last receipt. Past the largest lines, the effort stops paying back.
Deleting flagged lines to make them go away. The spend was real. Removing it understates your emissions and will be visible to anyone reviewing the result.
Am I finished? What now?
There isn't one answer, because "finished" depends on what you're going to do with the number. Find yourself below.
If you're preparing for an audit or verification
Completeness comes first, and by some distance. A verifier's opening question is whether anything is missing, and an unresolved flagged line is a visible hole in the boundary of what you've reported. You want the "Attention Required" list as short as you can reasonably get it, and you want to be able to say what's left on it and why.
Getting to zero isn't the test. A handful of genuinely ambiguous lines, each one explainable, is fine. A hundred untouched ones is not, because it means nobody has looked.
How much document evidence you need after that depends on the level of assurance being asked for.
Limited assurance, which is the common starting point, is largely about whether anything looks wrong. A complete calculation, spend-based estimates where that's all you have, and documents behind the largest accounts will usually carry it.
Reasonable assurance asks the verifier to test the numbers rather than review them, so it wants source documents wherever they exist, particularly for anything material. If that's where you're headed, plan the document-gathering as real work rather than a tidy-up at the end.
Either way, make sure the Master File tells the story. It records where every quantity came from, and that trail is what gets examined.
If you're trying to reduce emissions in your own business
Completeness matters less here, and accuracy in the right places matters much more. You're not defending a total to anybody. You're deciding where to spend money and effort, and that only needs the picture to be right where the emissions actually are.
Go to your chart of climate-related accounts and find the heavy ones. In most businesses a small number of accounts carry most of the emissions: the fuel card, the natural gas bill, the electricity account, the fleet. Get those as accurate as you can. Documents, real quantities, meter readings if you have them.
The long tail can stay spend-based indefinitely. Sharpening a small account changes your total by a rounding error and changes your decisions not at all.
The advantage of doing it this way is that when you act on something and want to show it worked, the account you changed is the one you already made accurate.
If you want year-over-year comparison
Consistency is what matters here, more than either completeness or accuracy on its own. A trend is only real if both years were measured the same way. An improvement that comes from better data rather than lower emissions is worse than useless, because it will be believed.
So the work is to bring your earlier year up to the same standard as this one. If last year was mostly spend-based and this year has documents behind the big accounts, the drop you're looking at may be measurement, not reduction.
Take care with your base year. Your base year is the fixed point every later comparison is measured against, and changing its data changes every target and every trend built on it. That doesn't mean leave it alone. Restating a base year is normal and sometimes required, particularly after a significant correction, an acquisition, or a change in how you calculate. But do it deliberately: restate the whole year rather than improving a few accounts, and record what you changed and why. A base year that has quietly drifted upward across three separate edits is a real problem, and it usually surfaces at the worst moment.
If you're unsure whether a change is big enough to need a restatement, that's a good question for your accountant or verifier before you make it, not after.
What happens next, whichever of those you are
Your report is ready to produce. It gives you the headline figures: your total, broken down by category and by source.
Export the Master File if anyone needs to check your work. This is the detailed backing file, covering every line, the quantity used, the factor applied, where that quantity came from, and how strong that basis was. If an accountant, an auditor, a customer or a lender asks how you got your number, this is the answer to that question, and it's meant to be read by someone who wasn't involved.
Your work carries forward. Account classifications, asset assignments and corrections are remembered. Next period starts from what you've already taught it, so the second reporting period is considerably faster than the first.
Still stuck?
If a flagged line doesn't fit any of the options, or a figure looks wrong and you can't see why, leave it flagged and contact support rather than guessing. A visible gap is recoverable. A wrong number that's been signed off is much harder to unwind.
Book a walkthrough with our team.