A Carbon Tracking Tool Built in a Week
How Boxcar Partnered with a B Corp Consultancy to Make Emissions Reporting Accessible
Visit scope3.devThe Challenge
Scope 3 emissions — the indirect emissions in a company's value chain — are the hardest part of carbon reporting. They typically account for the majority of a business's carbon footprint, but tracking them requires collecting data from suppliers, estimating activity-based emissions, and navigating complex reporting frameworks.
For large enterprises, there are expensive platforms and dedicated sustainability teams to handle this. For small and mid-sized businesses trying to do the right thing? The options are limited: complicated spreadsheets, expensive consultants, or costly tools built for companies ten times their size.
A B Corp consultancy approached Boxcar with a clear brief: could we build something that makes Scope 3 tracking accessible for the businesses they advise — companies that want to measure and reduce their emissions but don't have a sustainability department?
The Approach
Boxcar worked with the consultancy to understand what their clients actually needed — a tool that tracks Scope 1, 2, and 3 emissions without the complexity and cost of enterprise platforms. Purpose-built for SMEs: straightforward to use by everyone, no sustainability department required.
Built in two weeks with a focused scope and clear outcomes. The tool allows businesses to input their supply chain and activity data, calculates emissions using established methodologies, and produces reports that meet standard frameworks.
As it turned out, the tool ended up being more transparent than many established alternatives. Every emission factor is traceable back to its source, giving users a complete audit trail — something that's surprisingly uncommon, even in much more expensive platforms.
The consultancy brought deep domain expertise in carbon accounting and B Corp certification. Boxcar brought the technical delivery. The partnership meant the tool was built by people who understood both the technology and the sustainability context — not just one or the other.
The Outcome
The result is a working Scope 3 emissions tracking tool that the consultancy now uses with their clients. Small and mid-sized businesses can measure, track, and report on their indirect emissions without needing enterprise software or a dedicated sustainability team.
This project is a good example of what happens when domain expertise meets rapid technical delivery. The consultancy knew exactly what their clients needed. Boxcar built it in a week. Neither could have done it as effectively alone.
For SMEs serious about sustainability, the barrier was never willingness — it was access to the right tools. This changed that.
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