Integrating Continia Sustainability with Business Central Sustainability

  • 25/03/2025
  • 7 minutes to read

Continia Sustainability enhances Business Central Sustainability (BC Sustainability) by adding automation, advanced calculations, and improved data management. It simplifies carbon accounting and reporting by reducing manual effort and providing key advantages, which are outlined in this article.

Automation

Continia Sustainability automatically applies Emission Factors directly from the Emission Factor Sets repository, whether managed by Continia or customized by the user. In contrast, with BC Sustainability Accounting Subcategories, emission factors must be manually entered and updated.

Automation in Continia Sustainability offers several advantages:

  1. Automated calculations – Continia Sustainability guides users by marking mandatory fields, ensuring that the correct data is entered. In BC Sustainability, users must specify the calculation format and manually identify which fields to complete.
  2. Automated unit conversion – the system automatically converts units of measurement to match the emission factors’ units, eliminating the need for manual conversion. In BC Sustainability, users must perform this conversion themselves.
  3. Automatic emission data collection – by linking your G/L accounts, items, and expenses correctly, Continia Sustainability automatically collects emission data and posts it directly to reports, saving time and reducing errors.
  4. Automated scope and category allocation – Continia Sustainability automatically allocates emissions to the correct scope and category, so users don’t need to know which activities belong to which scope. In BC Sustainability, users must have this knowledge.
  5. Multiple allocations of emission results – Continia Sustainability automatically allocates multiple emission results from the same entry into multiple scopes and categories, streamlining the process.

Market-based calculations

Continia Sustainability supports electricity calculation for both location- and market-based approaches, enabling more precise sustainability reporting and complying with GHG Protocol requirements.

CO2 equivalents

Continia Sustainability uses CO₂ equivalents results, which are broken down into 6 of the Kyoto Protocol gases (CO2e of CO2, CH4, N20, SF6, PFCs, HFCs) at Emission Factor level. Instead, BC Sustainability reports results using only 3 of these gases in their standard form and not CO2e form.

Multiple postings per entry

Continia Sustainability allows you to allocate emissions to multiple accounts for a single entry, unlike BC Sustainability, which typically uses a one-to-one mapping. For example, when a company purchases electricity, direct emissions are recorded in the primary environmental account based on location and market, upstream emissions are assigned to a Scope 3 account, and any additional scope emissions are categorized separately. This flexibility ensures accurate tracking and reporting. In contrast, with Business Central Sustainability, you would need to manually duplicate or multiply your entry to achieve the same result.

Automatic data posting

Continia Sustainability extends BC Sustainability functionalities by enhancing its posting routing and automatically posting environmental data from Continia pages and workflows to Business Central Sustainability pages, including Reports, the Chart of Accounts, and Sustainability Ledger Entries.

When entering emission data in a purchase invoice, expense, or document journal, the results will be displayed either in the Environmental Journal (as usual) or directly in the reports—such as Continia’s Environmental reports and Emissions by Scope report, BC Sustainability reports, and Financial Reports. If emission data is missing, a job queue imports the related entries into the Environmental Journal so you can review and complete them before posting them to the reports.

When enabled, this feature automatically imports data from purchase invoices, item ledger entries, G/L entries, and expenses into the Environmental Journal and posts the entries, eliminating the need for manual data import or journal posting.

To enable the extended posting routine, follow the steps described below.

Step 1: Create Environmental Account and Emission Types Posting Groups

These posting groups should best represent your activities. During a first-time installation, these groups are automatically created through the configuration data provided by the installation wizard (Set up Continia Sustainability). However, you can modify these or add new ones as needed.

To add an Environmental Account Posting Group:

  1. Use the Search icon to find Environmental Account Posting Group and select the related link.
  2. On the Environmental Account Posting Group card, click New, then fill in the Code and Description.
  3. Repeat the process for Emission Types Posting Groups.

Step 2: Assign these posting groups to each Environmental Account and Emission Type card.

In this step, you will assign the previously created posting groups to the relevant Environmental Account and Emission Type cards.

For example:

  1. Search for Facilities and select an Environmental Account.
  2. In the General FastTab of the Environmental Account card, under the Posting Details group, select the relevant Environmental Account Posting Group for this account.
  3. Repeat the same steps for the Emission Types cards.

Step 3: Allocate emissions to the Business Central Chart of Sustainability Accounts

Using the combination of Environmental Accounts and Emission Types (or just Environmental Accounts) to specify where emissions resulting from these accounts should be allocated in the Business Central Chart of Sustainability Accounts.

  1. Search for Sustainability Posting Setup.
  2. Adjust or create the combination, specifying a Primary Account, and if applicable, Scope 3 and Out of Scope accounts from the Chart of Sustainability Accounts.

Once you work with environmental journals, the selected posting group will appear in the journal. After entering data (e.g., liters) and posting the journal, the information will be recorded in the Business Central Sustainability Ledger Entries and the Chart of Sustainability Accounts. Since posting groups are automatically created during installation, you can immediately start allocating emissions across multiple accounts in BC Sustainability without needing further setup.