Are you ready to track and report on carbon emissions with Continia?

With Continia Sustainability, you can measure and document your company’s climate impact directly from Business Central.

Continia Sustainability is a comprehensive carbon management platform for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central. The solution offers a seamless way to collect, analyse and report your carbon emissions, so you can simplify your ESG data management.

In the following webinar and demo of the solution you’ll learn more on how Continia Sustainability will allow you to:

• Automate your carbon accounting: Effortlessly track, calculate, and report your carbon emissions with automated processes.
• Accurately track emission: Accurately measure Scope 1, 2, and 3 emissions using more than 50,000 up-to-date emission factors.
• Stay compliant: Fulfill key reporting requirements from CSRD, ESRS, CDP with ease.
• Achieve reliable reporting: Create dependable carbon reports that align with the GHG protocol.
• Create a seamless workflow: Ensure a smooth workflow in one central system built directly into Business Central.

Fully integrated with other Continia solutions

Collect your data efficiently with integrations to Continia Expense Management and Continia Document Capture. You can automatically pull financial data from travel expenses, purchase invoices, and ledger entries to calculate your emissions accurately and streamline your sustainability reporting.

Transcript

0:06

So, welcome everybody, it’s midday.

0:08

We’re going to start talking today with Continia, talking all around sustainability and managing your carbon emissions. So, speakers today, I’ll get Martijn to introduce himself shortly, but my name is the Danusia Jolliffe, I’m the Customer Success Director here at TVision, and I look after clients when they’ve moved across to us from their projects. I’ve been here for seven years now, and I will be managing the back end of the webinar.

0:36

So, if anybody has any questions, please do put them into the question box and I will ask Martijn at an appropriate point and if we don’t have time, we will answer them offline via email.

0:47

Martijn, if you’d like to introduce yourself quickly, please.

0:50

Absolutely.

0:50

Thank you, Danusia.

0:51

Good afternoon, everybody.

0:52

My name is Martijn.

0:54

I work at Continia, like Danusia said, and I’ll be taking you through our new solution called Continia Sustainability.

1:00

With this solution, you will be able to track your carbon emissions, which is a new law which was introduced by the EU.

1:09

And today I’m going to start off with a quick PowerPoint to get you up to speed why we’re doing it.

1:13

And then I will show you a brief demonstration of how it looks like within your Business Central.

1:19

Of course, this webinar will take around 30 minutes and we can show you a lot more, but then please contact your representative at TVision and we’ll schedule a one-on-one demo for you.

1:28

…and if you’ve got questions, like Danusia said, please ask them in the chat and I’ll hopefully be able to answer them at the end of the webinar.

1:38

So, in terms of the agenda, obviously Martijn will provide that introduction, talk about why you should be doing carbon accounting, giving a really snapshot overview demo of Continia Sustainability.

1:50

And as he mentioned, if you’d like something longer, more in-depth, we can of course arrange that for you. And then we can answer any questions at the end.

1:58

But I’ll be keeping track of those as we go along. So, if anything crops up, please do ask in the question box. Martijn, over to you.

2:05

Super. Thank you, Danusia. So, first of all, why carbon emission tracking?

2:12

The EU passed a new legislation that companies above a certain threshold would need to report on ESG reporting.

2:20

In this ESG reporting, they need to report on their environmental, social and governance part.

2:27

With Continia Sustainability, we’re going to help you with the environmental part, helping you track your carbon emissions.

2:32

The picture you see in front of you is not something that Continia created; it is something that the EU created to help you track your carbon emissions.

2:41

And this is what you need to report on.

2:43

Basically, in the cloud at the top, you see all the bad gases that we need to report on.

2:47

And they all bundled these together and called them CO2e or CO2 equivalent to make it easy.

2:55

And then as a company, you would need to report in scope number one, two, and three.

3:00

In scope number one, you basically report on the emissions of your own company, your facilities, your company vehicles, your factory, maybe all of that.

3:10

Difficult, but it’s not the worst and it’s doable.

3:13

Then on the left, we can see scope number two, where you have to report on your used electricity, steam, gas, coolant, or what you’re using.

3:27

Also, a lot of work, but it’s still doable.

3:31

But now we’re getting to a more in depth.

3:33

We got scope three, indirect.

3:35

On the left-hand side, you basically got everything you need to report on in your value chain.

3:41

So, you got your fuel and energy, your transport and distribution, your business travel, employee commuting, all of this you need to keep track of.

3:50

And then on the right-hand side, once you’ve created your product, you need to track the emissions of it during its life cycle, how much it’s emitting during its life cycle, its end-of-life usage, everything.

4:03

And now a lot of companies, like yourself say, well, I do not have to report because I do not meet the threshold.

4:09

And that is correct.

4:10

However, if you deliver services or goods to a company that does have the requirement to have a reporting, they’re going to ask you as well because you are in their value chain.

4:22

And then they’re going to say, please give me your ESG reporting, how much carbon emissions are you emitting?

4:29

Also, having an ESG report and making sure track your carbon emissions is good for your stakeholders, for your brand loyalty, because customers are getting more and more sustainable, and this will give you a competitive edge.

4:46

All of this reporting and tracking of carbon emissions is a lot of work, but we created Continia Sustainability to help you with this.

4:54

First of all, how can we track your emissions?

4:57

And with Continia Sustainability, we can do that in the two approved ways.

5:00

The first one is a spend-based method where you basically attach a CO2 equivalent to a monetary value.

5:07

So, you can say I bought a thousand pounds worth of fuel.

5:14

And then what we’ll do, we’ll worry about this later, we look in the emission factor sets how much a CO2 equivalent equals one pound and do that thousands of thousands as a simple example.

5:26

This method is approved and is still used a lot because we do not, the government does not have all the data for every facet yet, but it’s not super accurate, but it’s allowed.

5:38

The second method is called activity-based method and here the tracking becomes much more accurate.

5:46

For example, I just mentioned, I said about a thousand pounds worth of fuel, but it would better if we say we bought a thousand litres of fuel, making your calculations and tracking a lot more accurate.

5:58

You can say how much kilowatt hours did we use of electricity in a certain month, how much weight did we transport, it will become a lot more accurate.

6:09

And the nice thing with our solution is we can do both and the system will know which method to apply in a certain situation. So, you do not have to think about that.

6:19

So, Continia Sustainability, why should you use it?

6:24

Well, first of all, we automatically calculate and allocate the emissions in the correct scope and category.

6:30

And our biggest plus, I would say, or one of the biggest pluses is that we connect with more than 50,000 emission factors.

6:38

And what are emission factors?

6:40

Well, in the UK, you actually got one of the most world-famous ones called DEFRA.

6:44

And DEFRA is a government body that basically makes all of these calculations, we hook into them, and then they know, they can calculate, okay, you used 200 watts of kilowatt hour, then it’s X amount of CO2e.

7:00

You drove from Birmingham to London in an X type of car, whether that is a Tesla electric or a diesel, a hybrid, or a petrol car.

7:10

The system can check in DEFRA how much CO2 did we emit.

7:14

So, and why do I say the big difference?

7:18

Microsoft also has a standard sustainability module now in Business Central.

7:23

The good thing is we’re good friends with Microsoft and we’re actually working with them together on this, where they say if you want a very basic solution to make some quick calculations, you can use ours.

7:34

If you want more and you want to automate things, go to Continia.

7:39

For example, Microsoft does not have a connection to DEFRA, which means that if you want to use the electricity example, calculate how much kilowatt hours, how much CO2e that is, you have to manually look it up, do a calculation and then type the number in. With us, that happens automatically.

8:00

Once all of the carbon data is in, we will create a report that is aligned with the greenhouse gas protocol.

8:08

That was the first slide that you saw, and that is what the EU wants, and then make sure that the government approves it.

8:14

And we also in that report, accountants can look how was the calculation made and what data source it was from.

8:23

So, they can see it came from DEFRA, which means that the accountants can now easily sign off on it because you did not fabricate the number yourselves.

8:33

As all of our Continia solutions is built inside Business Central, so it’s easy for your finance team to use.

8:39

It will work in many different ways, which I’ll be showing you in a couple of minutes, but also it integrates very well with Document Capture.

8:47

Our solution for scanning, registering and archiving of your incoming invoice and credit notes, which means we can automatically capture the sustainability data of an invoice, but it also integrates with Expense Management.

9:00

And for example, for employee expenses, you can now easily track their carbon emissions.

9:05

Whether they book an airline ticket, you can type in, I fly from Birmingham Airport to Amsterdam airport, in what class are you flying, and then it will calculate how much carbon you emitted.

9:19

Super nice and easy.

9:24

In Expense Management, if you’re already using it, you will get sustainability fields within the app.

9:29

For example, also if you’re staying in a hotel, the system will capture the number of nights that you’re staying, and then you can either select the country you’re staying in or let Expense Management capture that itself in a dual calculation for you.

9:44

And with Document Capture, we capture the data of invoices.

9:49

Now, the final slide before, I’m going to show it to you in real life.

9:53

On the left-hand side, we basically have the source type, how do we feed the sustainability system?

10:01

Well, we can do that from your expenses, your invoices, your credit notes, but also from your item that your entries and your GL entries.

10:08

These get registered, and within Document Capture and Expense Management you will get additional fields and if you open up a standard Business Central, type in an invoice manually, those fields will also be added.

10:20

That’s maybe a good point to note, Contina Sustainability will work as a standalone solution so you do not need Expense Management or Document Capture, however it will make the life of your finance team a lot easier.

10:35

Then moving on to the third column, it will be imported into the environmental journals, then Continia Sustainability will make a calculation and allocate the emissions in the correct scope and category and at the end you will have a sustainability report aligned with the greenhouse gas protocol ready to put into your ESG report.

10:56

So, this is Continia Sustainability on paper.

10:59

But now let me show you how it looks like in real life.

11:02

I’m going to switch my screen, so bear with me.

11:06

I’m going to quickly click before maybe my Business Central goes to sleep.

11:10

Yes, it still works.

11:12

So, Continia Sustainability will be fully integrated into your Business Central.

11:18

I first want to show you some settings and then I will show you how we actually feed the system.

11:22

So, if I go over here and then explore more roles and then to my Continia Sustainability.

11:31

Setting up Continia Sustainability is not difficult, but you have some homework to do as a company.

11:39

Basically, you’re setting up, yeah, like a new chart of accounts.

11:42

Let’s call it a chart of carbon accounts.

11:44

You’re going to create your environmental accounts, and we’re going to give you like a default template, but you’re going to adjust this to your company’s requirements.

11:55

For example, if you do not have vehicles, we’re not going to create an environmental account vehicle.

11:59

I know this is a bit of a silly example, but this is how you will go through it. And your accountant and or sustainability consultants will be able to tell you what you would as a company need to report on. And if I click for example, on vehicles you get a similar look and feel to Business Central to a chart of accounts but you will create your chart of carbon accounts.

12:23

In this case it’s our cars you can add them over here. And the same goes for your facilities, for example.

12:32

Let me quickly go back to your facilities or your waste, your business travel, you can create your own environmental accounts, and this is what you do. And the same you do that for your emission types.

12:44

This is scope number two; this is your purchased electricity and heating maybe.

12:49

If you are not, you do not have a factory, you probably do not have fugitive emissions.

12:53

So, you do not need to report on this. But you do set it up over here.

12:59

And then on the right-hand side, we got the emission factor sets. In the UK, it’s one of the first countries we launched in.

13:05

That’s also because the UK government has two very good emission factor sets.

13:11

One is called DEFRA and the other one is called SIC codes.

13:16

And Continia Sustainability will use both of these. If your company works in different countries as well, we also have some country-specific ones.

13:28

We’ll be adding new countries later on if your governments have an emission factor set.

13:34

However, if a country does not have an emission factor set, actually the UK DEFRA is one of the most widely used worldwide and you can use that one to make the calculations for you.

13:46

And you will all set that up over here.

13:50

Once that is done, you will have your environmental journals, where we will later be coming back when we posted some invoices, and then we can see some calculations that are being made.

13:59

So, in the webinar today, I want to make two examples.

14:03

I want to firstly capture an invoice manually.

14:06

So, what I’ll do, I’ll type in purchase invoice, like this.

14:13

And then I will, in a second, start creating in the normal invoice.

14:17

I’ll select the vendor. This one for example. Like you’re used to, the invoice number one, two, three four and then I’m going to say, I’m going to post on the general ledger account. I’m going to buy electricity for my property… I fill in the quantity – one time. It was 300 pounds and then what happens over here next to the 300 you will see a lot of environmental accounts showing up and this is all coming from within Continia Sustainability.

14:52

Basically, what you will define per general ledger account, what environmental accounts are used, so you will select your environmental account type. Which was facility in this case. Then within that environmental account type, you will select what it was, and all of this information comes from the emission factor sets, in this case electricity, and then it will fill in all of these next four fields automatically.

15:17

It’s electricity, ELUK is an emission factor set from DEFRA that calculates your electricity for measuring energy in kilowatt hours, and then I’m going to say we processed 500 kilowatt hours in a month.

15:32

Then once you’re done, you can post the invoice like normal, and you’re done.

15:38

So, this is an example of how Continia Sustainability will work as a standalone.

15:42

However, if you’re using Document Capture already, then this next screen will look familiar to you.

15:48

In this screen, you will process the invoices like normal.

15:51

With Document Capture, you tell the system one time where the information on the invoice is and how you would like to be processed, and next time it can go in automatically.

16:00

So, at the bottom, I got an electricity invoice.

16:03

I’m going to create a vendor, and all of these steps are familiar to users who already use the software, Document Capture.

16:12

Captured all of the details that I want.

16:14

I’m going to select a general ledger account.

16:16

I’m going to do the same one as before, electricity for property.

16:20

Yes.

16:21

And then the finance team will get a warning saying, hey, we got sustainability values identified on the general ledger account.

16:28

Please add those fields, which we can, of course, automate.

16:32

I would like to add them please.

16:34

I’m going to add them all, and same as before, all of the information is filled in automatically.

16:40

I just have to tell the system where to find those kilowatt hours.

16:44

I’m going to say with my left-hand mouse button and my right-hand mouse button and now Document Capture knows how to capture the kilowatt hours for Continia Sustainability from now on.

16:55

It’s a one-time exercise and you’re done.

16:58

I can now register this document and then you can see over here everything has been filled in automatically without me having to type anything manually.

17:12

I’m going to post it and we’re done.

17:15

This is an example how Document Capture, but also Expense Management. can make your life easier.

17:22

Now that we have some sustainability data, I can go to my environmental journals.

17:26

In the current version, which will be renewed on the 1st of April, I do not have to press the button import data anymore, it will happen automatically.

17:35

We get to see that on the facility we have two journal lines.

17:38

And if you click on those journal lines, we can see that Continia Sustainability, measured it was electricity, it will put it in scope number two.

17:48

We can see the kilowatt hours.

17:50

And then on the right-hand side, we can see the automatic calculation that the system made. And what the system did, it made two calculations.

18:00

Why did we do that?

18:01

Well, if you’re doing an activity based calculational electricity, we need to do a both a location and market based calculation. And what is the difference?

18:14

Well, with market with sorry, with local based, basically, you can say as a company, I’m going to pay a little bit of extra money to my electricity company for only purchasing sustainable energy from windmills or hydro energy, something like that, which will, of course, lower your carbon emissions, which is good.

18:35

But the EU also says, let’s see what the average market is doing.

18:41

So, for example, maybe the UK, and I’m making these numbers up, 60% from energy comes from coal, 20% from nuclear, and 30% from renewable energy sources.

18:53

But then you get a completely different number.

18:55

And the EU wants you to report on both.

18:59

You can choose the lowest of the two to actually put in your ESG report, but this hopefully shows you that you can maybe still lower your emissions.

19:09

Now, and we do that automatically, which is quite nice.

19:13

And if you click on the emissions, we can see that Continia allocated mainly everything is scope number two, but it also looked at the emission factor set and the emission factor set, yes, but you also have a bit of distribution from the power plant to your office.

19:28

And there’s maybe a bit of leakage.

19:30

And we will automatically allocate that as scope number three for you.

19:33

So, you do not have to think about it.

19:35

We do that automatically.

19:37

And then on the right-hand side, you can see the data source.

19:40

Basically, on the top right, we can see how many kilowatt hours we have used.

19:45

We can see the emission factor set, which is DEFRA in this case, and we can also see the emission factor set version.

19:53

DEFRA will release new versions during the year.

19:56

We do not know the dates when they’re doing this.

19:59

However, for example, they’re not going to release a new version on the 1st of January 2025.

20:05

They maybe do this later in May.

20:07

And then what you can do with Continia, we can say, well, once the new emission factor set has been released in May 2025, I want you to reevaluate my values from January 1st up to now.

20:19

So, you don’t have to do everything all over again.

20:21

We can do that with a click of a button.

20:25

We can see the greenhouse gases that were produced and where it comes from.

20:30

All nice and transparent.

20:33

Now that once you’re happy, I can go back and then I can post them.

20:37

We can automate this, so you don’t have to do this every time.

20:40

And then we’re done over here.

20:43

And now the final part of this short overview Continia Sustainability, we get the sustainability report.

20:51

At the top, you can put in filters per year, per month, but also by dimension.

20:58

And also, if you get multiple countries, you can do this.

21:00

And then we can see here scope number one, emissions, number two, location and market based. And we can see scope number three.

21:09

And then at the bottom, you can see per year how much CO2 we emitted.

21:19

With Continia Sustainability, we’re constantly developing more.

21:23

We have a whole sustainability team working on our end, connecting to the emission factor sets, but also adding more things like water usage, waste, and other article reporting requirements that you have to do.

21:40

We’re even thinking about making modules later on for the social and governance part of the ESG reporting, but we’re not there right now.

21:51

In the UK, we see a lot of interest for this.

21:54

The first customers are in the test phase right now and they should be going live within a month.

22:01

The solution is available to you, TVision/Bevica customers.

22:08

And yeah, TVision will be more than happy to tell you more about this. For now, this is what I wanted to show you today.

22:17

Danusia or Michiel, are there any questions so far?

22:20

So, we’ve had two questions. One was around, could you share a little bit more about pricing?

22:26

And the other one was, so obviously Microsoft have a sustainability piece, so what is the big benefit of using yours?

22:37

Like in a nutshell, what’s the one big benefit of using a Continia Sustainability over the basic standard BC.

22:47

Yeah, clear, clear.

22:48

So, I also have, and I will send it to you, Danusia, that you can distribute that with the customers that are in the webinar and also not here, a benchmark of what the difference is between our solution and the one from Microsoft.

23:00

But I would say the biggest difference is, of the two, one is the automatic calculation and allocation of the emissions and in the right scoping category, which you saw on the previous screen.

23:12

This is not something that Microsoft does automatically.

23:16

Also, going into that, how do we get that?

23:19

Because we connect to the emission factor sets, and that’s not something that Microsoft doesn’t do.

23:24

You have to go to DEFRA, basically open up a big Excel sheet, search for what you’ve done, and then do monetary value times X amount of CO2e, you get a number, and then you type it into Business Central.

23:38

So, it’s a lot of manual work.

23:42

Pricing, it is quite straightforward now.

23:44

It’s a fixed subscription fee per month.

23:47

Continia Sustainability will work from Business Central 26 and onward from now on.

23:53

And it will cost 190 pounds out of my head, but I can have a quick look, per production environment per month.

24:03

If you have multiple production environments, the price will go down a little bit.

24:09

Let me go to GBP, cloud, and then Continia Sustainability, and that is two companies, but if you do one company, it’s £180 per month, and then every additional production environment is £120 a month fixed fee.

24:28

Okay.

24:28

We’ve had another question saying, do you have to have Document Capture and Expense Management for sustainability to work or is it just recommended?

24:38

It’s not mandatory and you can do this without either of the two solutions however it will make the life of the finance team a lot easier because they don’t have to type everything in manually, but it will work as a standalone perfectly.

24:51

Great thank you.

24:54

And then the last question that we’ve had, or the most recent one is, from start to go, how long would it take to get live? That’s a bit of a difficult question.

25:07

What we saw in the first implementations that we did/done, that it’s not difficult for the finance team to set this up, because it is not difficult.

25:19

However, you do actually get a lot of homework, because basically you’re going across all of your general ledger accounts filling the environmental data.

25:28

Before that, actually, you will talk with your accountant or sustainability expert on what you would need to report on.

25:37

So, training-wise, it’s very short, a couple of days, I don’t even think that, but you have some homework to do to set everything up properly. Okay, thank you.

25:47

That’s all we’ve had for the time being. Yes. Right, lovely.

25:51

So, thank you very much for the demo. And again, this is always our summary, we like to review – what was the intention of the webinar? What was the intention of the demo?

25:59

So why should you be using Continia Sustainability?

26:02

Clearly there are less manual tasks because it cannot be automated.

26:06

There is that seamless integration, as we’ve said with Business Central and Bevica.

26:11

And likewise, it cooperates with Document Capture and Expense Management, although they aren’t necessary, but they can be used as well.

26:18

So, can I ask you just to talk through the webinar participants offer that you’ve put on there for our attendees, please?

26:26

Absolutely, especially for the TVision and Bevica customers, if you want to start off with this and do an implementation before June 30th of this year, you will get the first three months off and that is because we want to create a foothold within the UK and of course we want the first TVision and Bevica customers to use Continia Sustainability.

26:47

So if you want more information, please contact Danusia or your representative at TVision, we can set up a one-on-one demo with you and your team, maybe also talk with your sustainability experts and we can have hours as well and see how we can make this work.

27:03

Great, lovely, thank you so much. So just to finish off, the last slide.

27:09

As always, thank you for attending.

27:11

Thank you, Continia, Martijn, for giving us that excellent demo on what sustainability looks like from Continia.

27:18

This webinar will be available on demand shortly on the website, and will be mentioned in future Bevica Matters, TVision Matters newsletters.

27:26

So once again, thank you so much for attending.

27:28

Thank you for doing your demo.

27:31

Thank you for helping us, and thank you and have a nice day, all of you.