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An assessment is one carbon footprint calculation: a single organisation, event, or product, over one defined period or scope. This page walks through your first one. Expect the data step to take most of the time. Everything else is quick.
1

Choose the assessment type

From your workspace, create a new assessment and pick the type:
  • Organisation: a whole company over a reporting period, usually a financial year. The most common starting point.
  • Event: a festival, conference, or one-off activity with a defined start and end.
  • Product: the life cycle footprint of a specific product.
Not sure which fits? See Assessment types for a fuller comparison.
2

Define the boundary and period

For an organisation assessment, you set:
  • The reporting period: for example 1 July to 30 June for an Australian financial year
  • The organisational boundary: which entities, sites, and operations are included
For a single-entity company, the default of everything you own and operate is usually right. If you have subsidiaries, joint ventures, or shared facilities, read Organisational boundaries before locking this in. Changing a boundary mid-assessment means re-checking everything already entered.
3

Bring in your data

Most assessments draw on more than one source:
  • Spend data: connect your accounting platform or import your ledger. Salvidia categorises the transactions and applies spend-based factors, reaching every category you buy from at once.
  • Activity data: for your biggest sources, enter real quantities: kWh, litres, kilometres, tonnes.
  • Supplier figures: where a supplier publishes real emissions data, use it in place of an average.
  • Spreadsheets: export from a utility portal or waste contractor and import the file.
The practical rule: let spend data give you coverage, then upgrade your largest categories to activity data. See Activity-based vs spend-based for when each applies, and What data you’ll need for a checklist.
4

Review the categorisation

Results mean nothing until the data lands in the right places. Three checks:
  • Skim the largest line items and confirm the assigned category makes sense
  • Recategorise anything wrong. One large miscategorised invoice can distort an entire category
  • Watch for double counting. If you entered electricity as kWh, the matching payments to your retailer must not also count as spend
5

Get your results

Your results appear organised by scope, meaning 1, 2, and 3, and by category, such as energy, travel, purchases, and waste. From here you can explore the breakdown in the dashboard, export tables and reports to share with your team or an auditor, and compare against future periods once you run your next assessment.
Your first assessment will not be perfect, and it does not need to be. Standard practice is to be transparent about what is included, then improve coverage and data quality each year.

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