Gravity's Top Carbon Accounting Features of 2024

To keep up with a changing regulatory environment and sustainability demands, companies are drowning in data and reporting obligations. Stakeholders now demand climate, ESG, and supplier information that can pass an audit, and the stakes – and the workloads – are fast increasing.

At Gravity, we believe software must play a role in enterprise carbon and energy management. But to truly make a difference, technology must address companies’ core challenges, by actually addressing messy data collection, sunsetting templates, elevating audit details at every calculation, matching relevant energy-saving vendors, and more. More than that, sustainability software must have a clear, testable return on investment – lower labor and audit costs, lower energy bills, or both – powered by relentless innovation.

True to our vision, Gravity launches new features and products week after week after week, with customer feedback as our north star. In 2024, that meant we launched over 100 new features, connecting the dots across data collection, carbon and ESG reporting, supplier engagement, project implementation, and more. As an ESG assurance advisor at a top consulting firm said this fall, “I have never seen a system this comprehensive before at our other clients.”

It’s hard to list all 100 new features, so here are the top features that Gravity customers across industries found most useful in 2024.

Seamless Supply Chain Engagement

As new regulations and customers increasingly demand Scope 3 data, we doubled down to make it simple to engage your supply chain in less time–without needing Excel templates.

Automatic supplier creation to organize supplier engagement: As data is populated in Gravity, the platform automatically extracts supplier information from line items and centralizes it for easy tracking. The software even intelligently ensures that data from a single company with different spelling or formatting is merged (for instance, you won’t have to deal with separate entries for “Acme” and “Acme LLC”). You can then engage your suppliers directly from this view and track the portion of the overall footprint that is supplier-specific.
Flexible Surveys that eliminate manual data entry: With our Surveys feature, customers can flexibly reach out to their suppliers (or portfolio companies) with ease. Customers can design the survey or start with a preconfigured one, preview it, and email it to suppliers. Surveys empower recipients to upload files and capture activity data. Suppliers can also benefit from all the data collection features that power the main platform. Once the activity data is collected, you can move it to different parts of your overall footprint to uplevel your Scope 3 measurement from estimates to primary data.
Collaboration features to simplify data collection: No one person has all the information required for disclosure. Our Collaboration features makes it possible for customers to invite others to provide data for carbon accounting–without requiring a Gravity account for every user. This makes it possible to delegate data collection to another person or to request data from a vendor for a single purchase.

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Scope 3 Data Automation

In addition to simplifying Supplier Engagement, we also enhanced the automation of our Scope 3 accounting solutions. Our goal is simple: to make it easy to manage tons of data with the highest levels of accuracy.

AI Emissions Factor Inference: Finding the correct emissions factor is often one of the most time-consuming parts of carbon accounting. Gravity’s technology automatically infers the most accurate emission factor based on the context of your data. This even applies to spreadsheets with thousands of rows of data, like an export from your accounting system. Gravity interprets spend account information, suppliers where relevant, etc. to automatically apply an emission factor in just a few seconds.
Expanded emission factor searchability: In 2024, we introduced Factor Explorer, an easy way for users to peruse gravity’s extensive library of emission factors. This includes the thousands of factors that Gravity’s Climate Strategy team has developed. While most calculations apply factors automatically, this expanded visibility is there for those who need it.
Automatic FERA calculations: When any fuel usage or electricity data is added to Sites or Fleets – via a utility bill or a fuel invoice, for example – Gravity can automatically track the Fuel- and Energy-Related Activities (FERA) emissions, a Scope 3 category in the GHG Protocol, for that site in addition to Scope 1 and/or Scope 2 – with no added work.
Operational boundary toggles: In 2024, we enhanced the flexibility of tracking different operational boundaries to match your business realities in the platform. Simple toggles enable users to correctly assign emissions to Scope 1 and 2, leased assets, or other Scope 3 categories.
Instant logistics and distance calculations: Travel details are one of the most common Scope 3 categories, but often one of the trickier ones to collect. Gravity can automatically calculate distances in your raw data, such as between ZIP Codes in a shipping report or between airport codes representing different flight segments.

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Automated QA and Audit-Readiness

Many disclosure rules are setting new requirements for data accuracy. Our automated QA and audit-readiness features ensure customers have the highest quality reports, supplementing our expert Climate Strategy team’s support so you’re prepared for the highest standard of regulation.

Duplicate data detection and remediation: Carbon accounting requires a lot of data, and sometimes duplicate data makes it into the system. Finding and handling duplicates can be tedious, manual and difficult. Now, Gravity can automatically and algorithmically find these potentially erroneous points, and surface them to ensure data accuracy. We make it easy to either remediate duplicate data and files or flag that they are not in fact duplicates.
Audit-ready methodology note exports: Conducting an audit and need to share your methodology? Users can quickly export measurement methodology and share with auditors.
Documentation and factor visibility for every calculation: Carbon accounting calculations should never be a black box and should never obscure which emission factor was used. Every calculation in Gravity elevates the emission factor used, its source, Global Warming Potential values, and constituent gases breakdown where available. This is viewable at the line-level and in bulk.

ESG Metrics and Reporting Templates

One of the most common requests we heard from customers was that they wanted a single platform to track and report Environmental, Social and Governance data. We made it happen with two new features that seamlessly integrate across the measurement, reporting, and supplier engagement sections of the platform.

Custom Metrics to any data points: On the Custom Metrics section of the platform, customers can preselect from commonly used ESG metrics groups, such as waste or water usage, or add their own, to ensure they can capture all the data that matters to their business in one place without needing to invest in multiple systems.
Custom Reporting Templates to report to anyone: We have pre-built templates for many key compliance disclosures, including regulations like CSRD and common customer requests like Walmart. This year, we also made it simple to build custom reports to easily share only the relevant data for other required disclosures.

Easy, But Effective Emissions Estimations

Our goal is to make it simple for you to collect the primary data you need to report most accurately, but sometimes you need to get started quickly or lack access to the necessary data. By adding site size and purpose to Site Configuration, we now capture metadata that allows us to deliver emissions estimates, normalization and intensity metrics, and self-serve reduction insights with one click.

In addition to sites, we can also provide spend-based calculations for procurement and PCAF-aligned estimations for financed emissions. Together, these features make it possible to get a quick estimate of your emissions before collecting primary data.

Complete Financed Emissions Solution

In 2024, we doubled down on building the best carbon accounting solution for PE firms, their portfolios, and others in the financial services industry with a slew of new features:

PCAF-aligned reports: We simplified the process for customers to report in line with the Partnership for Carbon Accounting Financials (PCAF) by surfacing all of the required information.
Manage different asset classes: Customers can now calculate their financed emissions on additional asset classes, including loans, real-estate, private and public equities, mortgages, debt, and more.
EDCI partnership: Gravity partnered with the ESG Data Convergence Initiative (EDCI) to build an inbound API so that the more than 450 private equity firms in the initiative could share their data with the organizing body with the click of a button directly from Gravity.
Bulk investment management: Customers with large portfolios often face huge amounts of manual work to onboard and add data for financed emissions. With bulk data management, we eliminate that work by making it possible to add invested entities (such as portfolio companies), financial vehicle information, and company emissions information.

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Customizable Data Visualization and Insights

Data isn’t useful without being able to access actionable insights. This year, we launched a completely customizable, self-serve business intelligence layer on top of all of your carbon and ESG data, allowing you to easily visualize and act on the most important insights.

Out-of-the-box insights and data visualization: Quickly make comparisons across sites, access cost-related insights, and capture consumption-related insights.
Completely customizable Business Insights: Need dashboards specific to your operational and reporting needs? Our custom BI tool allows you to build custom dashboards, across all your ESG data, not just carbon.

How to Use These Tools

All together, these features ensure that Gravity has the most comprehensive and powerful carbon accounting solution on the market. In addition to these features, we have a world-class team of policy and climate experts on hand to offer hands-on support to our customers. We’ve also invested in empowering customers to take action after reporting, building out a comprehensive energy efficiency offering that helps to identify cost-effective energy efficiency projects, identify the right partners, and execute in record time.

If you’re in the market for an all-in-one carbon and ESG management platform – or if you’re curious about any of the features above – reach out. We’d be happy to show you how the platform lives up to our promises.

Stay tuned to see what we release in 2025.

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