As regulatory bodies begin to implement climate-disclosure requirements, businesses are going to be held accountable for understanding and reporting their environmental impact. This trend has given rise to carbon-accounting software products from startups such as Greenly and Sphera as well as longtime IT vendors such as IBM with its Environmental Intelligence Suite.
Another player in the carbon-accounting market is In Bold Print, which calls itself the "TurboTax of carbon accounting."
Cofounders Ashley Pradhan (CEO) and Cierra Valor (COO) set out to create software that helps businesses measure and report their carbon emissions with the bottom line in mind. The platform has wizard-like interface, prompting business owners to answer a series of questions. In Bold Print handles the rest, helping them understand where they are and how they can reduce their emissions. It covers Scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions.
(According to the EPA, Scope 1 emissions are direct greenhouse emissions that occur from sources that are controlled or owned by an organization, including emissions associated with fuel combustion in boilers, furnaces and vehicles. Scope 2 emissions are indirect GHG emissions associated with the purchase of electricity, steam, heat or cooling. Scope 3 emissions are the result of activities from assets not owned or controlled by the reporting organization but that affect its value chain.)
In Bold Print's software is targeted at smaller businesses that might not be able to afford consultants and accountants to do their disclosures, Pradhan said. "Some of the more mature companies have a head of sustainability or a full data team that can really help them connect the pieces and put that story together. But a lot of those suppliers, especially in the SMB market, can’t afford the accountants or those types of tools," she said.
The software uses a guided, step-by-step wizard similar to how TurboTax works, but instead of uploading a W-2 form, you take entries from your energy bill and look for the kilowatts per hour for the month. Once the data is entered, the software looks for potential reduction options.
An electric bill is just one of the elements from which In Bold Print draws a picture of a company's carbon emissions. It asks other questions such as if you have facilities that you operate out of, and specifics about your heating or cooling equipment. The dashboard shows different decarbonization scenario analyses. A customer can compare two vendors of renewable energy, for example, and they can look at how much they’ve spent on energy and how much energy they’ve consumed during the last reporting period.
As it relates to data centers, the software spans not only on-premises facilities but also cloud service providers. AWS provides emissions data related to their data centers, and In Bold Print’s software can pull in that emissions data and incorporate it with the rest of the customer's operational data.
And much like TurboTax offers auditing protection, In Bold Print offers its own form of auditing protection. Pradhan said that measurement and auditing have to be done by two separate companies. So it does the measurement piece of the task, and then the company has its results audited by a third-party provider.
Pradhan cited as an example a large retail customer that needed to measure its own emissions as well as factor in emissions data from hundreds of suppliers. The platform incorporates questionnaires filled out by the retailer’s suppliers to give a full analysis of all of its resources. That allows the retailer to share their emissions report directly with the SEC or any of their stakeholders, Pradhan said. The data integration capabilities and dashboards also allow the retailer to identify which suppliers are its greatest emitters, she said.
In Bold Print's carbon accounting software is available now.