How to Automate Persefoni

A carbon footprint is an accounting exercise, not an opinion

Persefoni is carbon accounting and climate disclosure software, used by sustainability teams, finance teams, and financial institutions that have to report the emissions of what they lend to and invest in. Persefoni for Business covers a company's own footprint and Persefoni for Financial Services covers financed emissions.

The word that matters in the product name is accounting. A footprint is not a claim a marketing team makes any more. It is a number in a filing, sitting beside the financial statements, calculated to a standard, checked by an assurance provider and read by a regulator. Under CSRD, ISSB and TCFD reporting, California SB 253 and SB 261, and the questionnaires customers now send down their supply chain, that number has to be defensible line by line.

Which means the interesting question about a carbon figure is never the calculation. It is where each input came from, and whether anyone can produce it again in two years.

The activity data arrives one PDF at a time

A footprint is built out of ordinary business records, and almost none of them start in the sustainability team's hands.

Electricity and gas for every site, which means a monthly statement in each utility's own portal, one login per account, and a company with thirty sites has thirty of those. Fuel for the fleet, sitting in the card provider's site as a transaction list. Air travel in the booking tool the travel agency runs. Waste tonnages in the hauler's account area. Freight in each carrier's portal. Shared services in a landlord's building portal, where a tenant gets whatever the landlord chooses to publish.

Then Scope 3, which is mostly other companies. Suppliers get a questionnaire and answer it late, partially, or in a spreadsheet with the units changed. Somebody keeps a list of who has replied, and that list is the real bottleneck in most reporting cycles.

Persefoni

Utility statements collected on posting day Each electricity and gas account visited when its bill appears, the consumption read off it and the document filed against the site it belongs to.

A supplier chase list that is current Who answered, who opened the request and did nothing, and who needs a third email, refreshed daily instead of rebuilt by hand each quarter.

Disclosure dates that do not creep up Framework deadlines and submission status watched on each programme's own site, so a reporting window is met rather than remembered.

Persefoni does the carbon maths and keeps the audit trail

Given the data, the platform is thorough about what happens next.

Figures come in through smart forms and bulk uploads, an API and an integration hub. Persefoni Copilot, built on the company's own large language model, answers technical carbon accounting questions inside the product instead of sending someone back to a standard. Anomaly detection looks across large datasets for statistical outliers, which is how a wrong facility figure in Scope 2 gets caught and taken back to the landlord who supplied it. Activity and audit logs record when a figure was added, changed or deleted and by which user, which is what an assurance provider will ask to see. Reports are generated aligned to CSRD, ISSB and TCFD, CDP, SECR and California SB 253 and 261, with the calculations still visible underneath, and Scope 3 supplier engagement is a module in its own right.

All of that begins after the number is in the system.

Getting it in is the other half of the year, and that half lives behind logins belonging to utilities, carriers, landlords, card providers and several hundred suppliers who have never heard of your reporting deadline.

The meter readings can collect themselves

A utility portal wants a username, a password and somebody to remember to visit. Only the third of those is ever in short supply.

Every electricity and gas account visited on the day its statement posts, the kilowatt hours and the therms read off the bill, the document filed against the site it belongs to. Fuel card transactions pulled monthly for the fleet. Waste tonnages taken from the hauler's account area. Freight and air travel gathered from the carrier and the booking tool, so the categories nobody gets to on time arrive with everything else.

Supplier engagement handled as the chase it actually is: a live list of who has responded, who opened the request and did nothing, and who is due a third email, refreshed daily rather than rebuilt by hand each quarter.

Deadlines and submission status watched on each framework's own site, so a disclosure window is met rather than remembered. Emission factor updates spotted when a publisher revises them, not when a restated figure turns up in a review.

The last step stays human, and it should. Anything that changes a reported figure, goes to an assurance provider or is filed with a regulator is prepared and waits for the person whose name is on the disclosure.

Fetching a utility bill is not sustainability work

A sustainability team was hired to reduce emissions. Most of its calendar goes on assembling the evidence that they have been measured, and the assembling is almost entirely logging into other organisations' websites.

WebRun is an agent that works a real Chrome browser, signed in as your team is. It opens the utility portal, the fuel card site, the carrier's account area or a framework's submission page, reads what is there, and brings back the figure with the document behind it.

It runs on your schedule in your own private environment, sessions are not shared between tools, and a workflow can be locked to a named list of domains. You can watch a run and stop it.

The workflows below are built, and each one lists the portals it visits.