Set up accounts for vehicles

Some of the most commonly used environmental accounts deal with vehicles. The types of vehicles can include:

• Passenger cars
• Vans and trucks
• Warehouse vehicles such as forklifts
• Aircraft
• Vessels such as boats

You have flexibility to arrange subcategories for these vehicle accounts in different ways, such as by vehicle type or vehicle home location.

Calculating emissions data

Consumption of fuel or electricity is key to vehicle accounts, so the Emissions Factor set up most commonly uses emissions data calculated directly from fuel consumption, from sources such as:

• Fuel receipts
• Invoices for electric vehicle charging

When fuel consumption data is not available or practical, you can calculate emissions data from distance.

Generally, it’s not recommended to calculate emissions for vehicles 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 vehicle accounts

You can use the vehicle accounts list page to create broad categories across your company fleet, for example by type of vehicle, and create individual cards for each vehicle.

In addition to the information in other environmental account cards, each vehicle card contains general information about the vehicle, such as VIN, registration and responsible staff member.

The Fuel & Energy FastTab allows you to set the fuel type and efficiency for each vehicle. The option for Propulsion Type controls whether other settings in this FastTab are available.

• Electric will show options for you to specify the location-based emission type from the emission types you have set up. You should also specify the vehicle’s Fuel Efficiency rate at kWh/km so that the market-based emission rates are also calculated.
• Fuel/bioenergy will show options for you to specify the Fuel/Bioenergy type. If you also specify the Fuel Efficiency rate you will get more accurate calculations.
• Plug-in Hybrid EV will show options for you to specify the emission types for Fuel/Bioenergy as well as Electricity. You should also specify the vehicle’s Fuel Efficiency rate at kWh/km so that the market-based emission rates are also calculated. Lastly, the PHEV Utility Factor will have a default value to specify the percentage of electricity used on average for the vehicle. This is an estimated value and you can adjust it higher for a vehicle that typically uses more electricity, or adjust it lower for a vehicle that typically uses more fuel.

The Emissions Factors FastTab shows different options, depending on the Propulsion Type you select in the Fuel & Energy FastTab.

The distance-based emissions calculations are optional to set up, and will make it possible for you to report emissions from distance instead of fuel or electricity consumption. For a Plug-In Hybrid EV, you must set up the distance-based section so that you can calculate emissions for both electricity and fuel with the same journal entry.

The image shows the Emission Factors FastTab for a Plug-In Hybrid EV.

Scenario

Cronus owns different types of vehicles for the sales team to use, so Ester wants to set up environmental accounts to handle these. The types of cars that Ester needs to set up are:

• A diesel-fuel car
• An electric vehicle
• A plug-in hybrid electric vehicle

Other resources

• Add a vehicle (Continia Docs article)
• Add emissions for a plug-in hybrid car (Continia Docs article)