1. Does anything sit at zero that should not?
Scan for categories showing nothing. A zero is a claim that those emissions do not exist, which is almost never true. It usually means a mapping gap, a missing period, or data that never arrived. Either fill it or estimate it. What you cannot do is leave it and call the footprint complete.2. Is anything off by a factor of a thousand?
Look for values wildly larger or smaller than their neighbours. That pattern is almost always kilograms entered where tonnes were expected, or the reverse. Waste is the usual culprit, because contractors report in both and neither number looks wrong on its own. Three tonnes and three thousand kilograms are the same figure. Three tonnes and three thousand tonnes are not, and only one of them is a plausible year for an office.3. Do your periods actually cover the year?
Sort your energy data by date and look for overlaps and gaps. Bills rarely align with a financial year. A quarterly bill running 15 June to 14 September straddles an Australian year end and needs apportioning by days. Monthly billing often produces thirteen invoices in a twelve-month year, or eleven. Also check invoice date against service date. An invoice issued in July for June consumption belongs to June, and sorting a ledger by invoice date silently shifts a month of energy into the wrong year.4. Do the sites match your boundary?
Compare the site list in your data against the boundary statement you wrote in lesson 2. A site in the data that is not in your boundary means one of the two is wrong. A site in your boundary with no data means something is missing. This check takes two minutes and catches errors that survive everything else.5. Does it pass the plausibility test?
Look at the total and the split and ask whether it describes the company you work at. An office of forty people using the electricity of a small factory is a data problem, not a discovery. Business travel at zero for a company that flies weekly means the travel data did not make it in. If a figure surprises you, chase it before you report it, because someone else will.Scope 3 dominating is not a failure of this test. For most service businesses it is the large majority of the footprint and entirely expected. Scope 3 looking small is the result worth suspecting.
Fix categories, not numbers
When a check surfaces something wrong, correct the underlying record. Recategorise the entry, fix the unit, add the missing period. Never adjust a quantity to make a total look right. It breaks the trail from figure back to source document, and that trail is the entire reason your number is defensible.You are done when
- No material category sits at zero without a documented reason
- No values are off by orders of magnitude
- Your periods cover the year exactly once, with no overlaps or gaps
- Your site list and boundary statement agree
- The total describes a company you recognise