Set up accounts for transport and distribution
- 4 Min.
Aside from vehicle accounts, there are three other environmental account types that deal with transportation:
- Transport and distribution
- Business travel
- Employee commuting
Calculating emissions data
Consumption of fuel or electricity is common to all these environmental account types, so the Emissions Factor set up most commonly uses emissions data calculated directly from fuel consumption, from sources such as:
- Fuel receipts for rental car or use of company car
- Invoices for electric vehicle charging
When fuel consumption data is not available or practical, you can calculate emissions data from distance and mode of transportation, from sources such as:
- Taxi receipts for business travel
- Purchase records of courier or shipping services
- Air travel tickets, including travel class
- Internal surveys on employee commuting
Generally, it’s not recommended to calculate emissions for transportation from amounts spent unless no other data is available. This is because costs for fuel and ticket availability can fluctuate significantly with location, seasonality and market conditions.
Set up transport and distribution accounts
You can use the transport and distribution accounts list page to create broad categories, for example to distinguish between incoming and outgoing logistics, as well as setting up individual transport and distribution accounts.
In addition to the information in other environmental cards, each transport and distribution account card specifies whether the account is for upstream or downstream transport, because related emissions are accounted in different scope 3 categories.
Set up business travel accounts
Business travel accounts include both transportation and accommodation. In many cases the business travel accounts list page will reflect this distinction, using separate categories for modes of travel and sub-categories used for travel class.
In addition to the information in other environmental account cards, each business travel card specifies the type of account:
- Land travel
- Air travel
- Sea travel
- Hotel
Set up employee commuting accounts
Employee commuting accounts can bet set up to reflect categories in a number of different ways. For example, you could group accounts by work location, encompassing different accounts for the range of transport methods used for commuting to each location.
Tip
As part of setting up employee commuting accounts, you might consider using employee surveys to help you establish data points about mode of transport, distance traveled, frequency of travel, and total workers at each location.
Employee commuting account cards do not require any information beyond the standard fields of all environmental account cards.
Scenario
Cronus uses transportation in a range of business activities, so Ester wants to set up environmental accounts to handle these.
- Cronus sends products internationally by air
- Cronus’ sales team regularly attend conferences within Europe, and travel by air
Other resources
- Add transport and distribution (Continia Docs article)
- Add business travel (Continia Docs article)
- Add an employee commuting card (Continia Docs article)