Carbonbench reads publicly published corporate carbon reports. If your company has never published one — like most SMEs, because nothing obliges you to — your profile simply says the equivalent of "no report found in our public scan". It is not a score, not a ranking, and not a judgment about your operations. A company with no label did nothing wrong; it just hasn't put a number in public yet.
We never invent estimates for companies that haven't disclosed. That is a core rule of the platform ("no evidence, no score") — which also means the moment you do publish a defensible number, the label changes.
Large companies increasingly have to report the emissions of their supply chain (so-called Scope 3) — to regulators, banks and their own customers. They cannot finish their homework without a number from you. That is why procurement teams have started checking platforms like this one before awarding contracts.
The good news: what they usually need first is modest — your electricity and fuel consumption for one year, turned into a small greenhouse-gas inventory. That is a bounded, one-time effort, not a new department.
Time budget in practice: one afternoon of document-gathering, one sitting with the assistant. A consultant is optional — you can start without one and bring one in only if your customer later asks for third-party assurance.
No. Carbonbench is not a regulator. The pressure is commercial — it comes from your customer's own reporting obligations. Treat it like a quality certificate a buyer asks for.
Work in progress in your account is yours, and the tool does not publish anything today. Details: Privacy and FAQ.
Yes — uploaded documents are machine-read to draft the inventory, and you approve every number before it is recorded. To read them, we send the documents to an external AI model provider (Google's Gemini API). If you prefer, you can type your figures into the assistant and upload nothing; what you type is processed by the same provider.
You correct it. For a sealed record, a correction creates a new sealed version; the old one stays visible as superseded. No silent edits, in either direction — that protects you as much as it protects the reader.
The platform is free. Your real cost is a day of attention. See Open Platform for how the project sustains itself.
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If your customer sent you a specific invitation link, use that — it connects your inventory to their supplier program automatically. See also: Supplier Engagement for the buyer's side of this page.