Methodology

CarbonKick Methodology

How we calculate, what we cite, and what we don't claim.

What CarbonKick measures

CarbonKick produces a self-reported, GHG Protocol-aligned carbon footprint for small businesses. Footprints are calculated across three scopes, following the Greenhouse Gas Protocol Corporate Standard:

• Scope 1 — Direct emissions from sources the business owns or controls (on-site fuel combustion, company vehicles, refrigerant leaks).
• Scope 2 — Indirect emissions from purchased energy (electricity, steam, heating, cooling).
• Scope 3 — All other indirect emissions across the value chain (purchased goods and services, transportation and distribution, waste, business travel, employee commuting, end-of-life of products sold).

Each line item in a CarbonKick footprint is classified into one of these three scopes and reported in kilograms of carbon dioxide equivalent (kg CO₂e), the standard unit that normalizes the warming impact of different greenhouse gases.

The output is a footprint generated by the business, from the business's own bills and invoices, and is intended for internal tracking, sustainability storytelling, supplier disclosure, and reduction planning. It is not a third-party-verified audit, and CarbonKick does not represent it as one.

How a bill becomes an emissions estimate

When a user uploads a utility bill, supplier invoice, freight document, or expense record, CarbonKick processes it in four stages:

1. Extraction. The document is parsed and key fields are identified — supplier, date, line items, quantities, units, and amounts.
2. Classification. Each extracted line item is matched to an emission activity category (e.g., electricity consumption, natural gas, freight transport, purchased goods) and assigned a GHG Protocol scope based on documented rules.
3. Factor lookup. The relevant emission factor is retrieved from CarbonKick's sourced factor registry (see below). Factors are matched by activity type, geography where applicable (e.g., grid emission factors vary by region), and unit (per kWh, per litre, per tonne-km, per USD spent).
4. Calculation. The line item's activity quantity is multiplied by the matched emission factor to produce a kg CO₂e estimate. Each line item is calculated independently and aggregated into the scope totals and overall footprint.

Emission factor sources

Every emission factor used by CarbonKick is drawn from a published, citable authority. The primary sources are:

• UK DEFRA / DESNZ Greenhouse Gas Conversion Factors — published annually by the UK Department for Energy Security and Net Zero, widely regarded as a gold-standard emission factor dataset. Used for fuel combustion, transport, freight, waste, water, and many Scope 3 categories.
• IPCC Emission Factor Database — the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's emission factor reference, used for fundamental constants and globally applicable factors.
• National and regional grid emission factors — for Scope 2 electricity, CarbonKick uses regionally appropriate grid emission factors drawn from published government sources (EPA eGRID for the US, equivalent national sources for other regions).

Every factor used in a CarbonKick calculation is tied to a sourced, dated reference. We maintain an internal emission factor registry that records the source, publication date, and version of each factor, and we update factors as authoritative sources publish new annual values.

How we classify scopes

Scope classification follows the GHG Protocol Corporate Standard. Below is the simplified logic CarbonKick applies to common line item types:

• On-site fuel combustion (natural gas, propane, heating oil burned on the business's premises) → Scope 1
• Company-owned vehicle fuel → Scope 1
• Refrigerant top-ups in owned equipment → Scope 1
• Purchased electricity → Scope 2
• Purchased steam, heating, cooling → Scope 2
• Purchased goods and services (raw materials, packaging, ingredients, supplies) → Scope 3, Category 1
• Inbound freight and shipping → Scope 3, Category 4
• Outbound freight and distribution → Scope 3, Category 9
• Waste disposal → Scope 3, Category 5
• Business travel (flights, hotels, rental cars) → Scope 3, Category 6
• Employee commuting → Scope 3, Category 7

Edge cases are handled by documented rules and surfaced to the user when classification is uncertain.

Confidence labels: Measured, Calculated, Estimated

Not all emissions data is equally precise. CarbonKick labels every line item with one of three confidence levels so users can see — and disclose — the quality of each estimate:

• Measured — derived from direct activity data with a clearly authoritative emission factor (e.g., kWh from a utility bill multiplied by a published grid factor). Highest confidence.
• Calculated — derived from activity data using a standard published factor where the activity-to-emission conversion is well-established but involves some assumption (e.g., freight emissions calculated from weight and distance using a category-average factor).
• Estimated — derived from spend-based or proxy data where activity data isn't available (e.g., USD spent on a category multiplied by an industry-average kg CO₂e/USD factor). Lowest confidence within the dataset, and CarbonKick consistently surfaces these as estimates rather than measurements.

This labeling is core to CarbonKick's anti-greenwashing position. A business should know — and be able to disclose — which parts of its footprint are well-substantiated and which are best-effort estimates. Hiding the distinction is how greenwashing happens. Showing it is how trust is built.

Consistency across runs

The same data, uploaded to CarbonKick, produces the same footprint every time. This is a deliberate design choice. Many AI tools introduce subtle variation between runs, which makes month-over-month tracking unreliable — a business can't know whether its emissions actually changed or whether the model just gave a different answer. CarbonKick's calculation engine is built to be deterministic and auditable, so the change in your footprint between one reporting period and the next reflects real change in your operations, not model noise.

Line items extracted from your documents are also deduplicated before final calculation, ensuring no double-counting between overlapping or repeated records. Deduplications are recorded in the calculation notes rather than hidden, so users can see exactly what was consolidated and why. The headline footprint number is always recalculated from the deduplicated line items, so the total displayed on the report matches the sum of the visible parts.

What CarbonKick is not

In the interest of honest positioning, here is what CarbonKick does not claim to be:

• Not a third-party audit. Footprints are self-reported by the business, generated from data the business provides. CarbonKick is not an accredited verifier and does not represent its outputs as externally audited.
• Not a certification. A CarbonKick footprint is not a "carbon neutral" or "net zero" certification. Those claims require additional steps (reduction plans, verified offsets, third-party validation) that are outside CarbonKick's scope.
• Not a substitute for professional environmental consulting. For complex multi-site operations, regulatory disclosure under SEC, CSRD, AASB, or TCFD frameworks, or any context requiring auditor-grade verification, CarbonKick provides a strong starting point but does not replace specialist professional services.
• Not a guarantee of accuracy beyond the inputs provided. If the underlying bills and invoices are incomplete or incorrect, the footprint will reflect those gaps. CarbonKick surfaces completeness gaps and flags suspected anomalies, but the integrity of the input is the user's responsibility.

Known limitations and ongoing work

CarbonKick is honest about where the methodology has room to improve. Active areas of refinement include:

• Commodity-specific factors for agricultural inputs. Items like green coffee beans, cacao, and other commodities are currently valued partly on a spend-based basis. Activity-based commodity factors (kg of commodity → kg CO₂e at production) are being developed to improve precision for food and beverage businesses.
• Scope 3 completeness. Scope 3 categories are inherently the hardest to fully measure. CarbonKick discloses Scope 3 gaps rather than hiding them, and works to expand coverage iteratively.
• Sanity-check validation on extracted values. Documents occasionally contain ambiguous fields (e.g., "842 therms" vs "84.2 therms"). CarbonKick is building range-validation and anomaly-flagging to catch extraction errors that would otherwise produce a consistent-but-wrong result.

This methodology will be updated as factors are refreshed, classification rules are refined, and validation logic is improved. The page version and last update date appear at the bottom of this document.

How to cite a CarbonKick footprint

Reports generated by CarbonKick include a footer with the version of the methodology used, the date of generation, and the source attribution. The recommended phrasing when referencing a CarbonKick footprint externally is:

Self-reported carbon footprint, GHG Protocol-aligned, generated by CarbonKick™.

Avoid representing a CarbonKick footprint as "certified," "verified," or "audit-ready." These terms imply external assurance that the methodology does not provide.

Questions and updates

Methodology questions, source recommendations, or correction requests can be sent to hello@carbonkick.ai.

This methodology was last updated June 28, 2026. Version 1.0.