Sustainability management overview
Important
This feature is available in Business Central starting from 2024 release wave 1.
Business Central offers a sustainability management feature that helps you monitor and manage your organization's and its effect on the environment. This feature is designed to oversee and regulate an organization's environmental footprint by tracking various greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. In this way, it facilitates proper insights. The feature supports the basic process of collecting emission data via sustainability journals or purchase documents, and recalculation of emissions to CO2 equivalent. You can either manually enter known data or use built-in methods for calculating emissions footprints; calculation using formulas are available for use only when using sustainability journals.
Note
This solution is still in early stages of development and new set of features will be added with the next release.
The first version of the feature focuses on GHG emissions. The environmental, social, and governance (ESG) standard defines three emission scopes:
- Scope 1 emissions include emissions from stationary and mobile combustion, and from inadvertent fugitive emissions.
- Scope 2 emissions include indirect emissions from the generation of energy that is purchased from utility providers.
- Scope 3 emissions include a wide spectrum of emissions, from purchased goods and services and capital goods, to fuel and energy–related activities, to upstream and downstream transportation, to generated waste, to business travel and employee commuting, and so on.
With this feature, you can:
- Set up emission factors for different sources and categories of GHG emissions.
- Record emission data in sustainability journals, either manually or by using predefined calculation methods.
- Record emission data directly working with purchase documents.
- Record purchase of carbon credit using purchase documents.
- Calculate internal carbon fee.
- Recalculate emission of all gasses to CO2 equivalent using formulas.
- Post emission entries (and carbon credits) to the sustainability ledger, where you can view and analyze the emission data by various dimensions.
- Set scorecards and goals and compare them with baseline and targeted values.
- Generate sustainability reports that show your organization's GHG emissions performance.
- Use financial reports for cross functional reporting.
To get started with sustainability management, use the following articles.
| Article | Description |
|---|---|
| Feature | |
| Sustainability setup | This article provides information to help you correctly configure the whole Sustainability module. |
| Chart of sustainability accounts and ledger | This article provides information on how to set up charts of sustainability accounts (CoSA), account categories, and subcategories. And also, how to analyze information in sustainability ledger entries. |
| Record sustainability entries | Use this article to learn how to work with all types of sustainability journals. |
| Work with carbon credits | Learn how to set up and purchase carbon credit. |
| Work with sustainability certificates | Learn what the sustainability certificates are and how to set up and use them. |
| Planning | |
| Sustainability scorecards and goals overview | Learn how to set up and use sustainability scorecards and goals. |
| Reporting | |
| Ad-hoc analysis of sustainability data | This article provides information about how to use ad-hoc analysis to analyze sustainability data directly from list pages and queries. |
| Sustainability reports and analytics in Business Central | This article provides information about how to use integrated reports and analytics related to Sustainability in Business Central. |
| Analyzing sustainability entries with financial reports | Describes how to use financial reports to create various views and reports for analyzing sustainability performance data. |
| Integrations | |
| Sustainability API | Use this article to learn how to create connected apps that establish a point-to-point connection between Business Central and non-Microsoft sustainability solutions or services using APIs. |
See also
Sustainability setup
Chart of sustainability accounts and ledger
Record sustainability entries
Ad-hoc analysis of sustainability data
Sustainability reports and analytics in Business Central
Sustainability API
Finance
Work with Business Central