Get your carbon data ready for action

The contract is signed and the data work starts. Most teams hit the same wall: supplier names that do not match across systems, spend lines with no identifiers, and a reporting deadline that has not moved.

Readiness has a definition. Every organisation in your spend file resolves to an identifier, every figure carries its source and change history, and the places where you hold no data stay visible in the output. That is what an SBTi baseline and an annual disclosure both need, and it is what a third-party auditor asks to see.

Why does data preparation stall after the contract is signed?

Because it gets scoped as an export rather than a matching problem. Teams pull spend from ERP, P2P and finance, find the same supplier spelled three ways, and start chasing the difference manually in spreadsheets. The hard part is reconciling one organisation across those three systems.

Most organisations already hold enough to begin. Spend data names who you buy from, how much you spent and often what you bought. That supports a first spend-based view of Scope 3 category 1 (purchased goods and services) and category 2 (capital goods), which primary data can refine later.

Which identifiers make spend data usable?

DUNS, LEI and ISIN. An identifier turns a supplier name into a specific legal entity, so the emissions attached to it belong to that entity rather than to a similarly named one. DitchCarbon runs entity resolution against DUNS, LEI and ISIN identifiers, so a spend file that carries them matches further on the first pass.

DUNS numbers (the Data Universal Numbering System) are the most common in procurement records, LEI codes appear in financial data, and ISINs identify listed securities, which matters when the organisations you measure are portfolio holdings. Include EIN, VAT or tax IDs and the parent company where you have them. Group structure is the difference between attributing spend to a local reseller and attributing it to the manufacturer.

How does preparing your own data reduce the load on suppliers?

It shortens what you ask for. A request that already contains what you know, and asks only for what is missing, is a much smaller job for the supplier. Prepopulated requests get higher response rates than a cold survey, so the matching earns its place before the outreach does. A recent deployment reached about 60% of a large supplier base within 2 weeks.

That leaves your survey capacity for the organisations where primary data changes the answer: your largest suppliers by spend, or the portfolio companies where exposure is concentrated.

You are probably on both sides of this. The organisation preparing a spend file for its own baseline is also the organisation being asked for emissions data by its customers and its investors. If that is you, claim your company profile and answer once, then reuse the answer.

What does the first baseline let you do?

DitchCarbon provides verified emissions data for over 2 million organisations, so procurement, sustainability and finance teams can measure and act on supply chain and portfolio emissions from one source. Given a prepared spend file, the first pass produces numbers you can defend within 2 weeks.

• Find the hotspots: the organisations and categories carrying the most emissions, ranked against your own spend.
• Target the engagement: ask a short list of material suppliers for primary data instead of surveying everyone.
• Track against a baseline: continuous refresh, with documented sources, so next quarter compares to this one.
• Show your working: source and change history on every figure, and coverage gaps shown, not hidden.

It fits the tools you already run, so the numbers land in your procurement and sustainability systems instead of another portal to log into. The integrations page has the detail.

Spend-based figures get challenged, so the method behind them matters. Our emission factor methodology for spend-based Scope 3 categories 1 and 2 was independently assessed by Globus Thenken in August 2025. The DitchCarbon Portal calculator is verified to ISO 14064-3, limited assurance, by UL Solutions, renewed annually, and DitchCarbon was the first company to earn UL Solutions' Sustainability Information Calculator Verification, June 2025. Audit-ready means that in practice: a documented method and a verified calculator, with both reports downloadable from the trust centre for your own third-party auditor.

How do you prepare a spend file before onboarding?

Five steps, and none of them need the platform to be live.

1. Export 12 to 24 months of spend. Supplier name, value, currency, date and category, straight out of ERP or P2P. Finance and procurement usually hold different halves of it.
2. Add the identifiers you already have. DUNS, LEI, ISIN, VAT or tax ID, and the parent company where you know it. This is the change that improves match rates most.
3. Normalise supplier names lightly. Strip legal suffixes and merge obvious duplicates, then stop. Entity resolution handles the remaining variation better than a manual clean.
4. Leave the gaps blank. A blank is something coverage reporting can show. A guess is something your auditor has to unpick later.
5. Send a sample early. Agree the column mapping and the identifier fields before the full load. A team of 15 analysts reviews the matching before you see a number.

Prepared data is what lets the first quarter be about reduction rather than reconciliation. The spend file you already have, plus the identifiers already sitting in it, is most of the way there.

See the coverage on your own supplier list. Send a spend file and we will show you which organisations resolve and where the gaps sit. Request a walkthrough. If you are the one being asked for emissions data, claim your profile instead.