Carbonly vs NetNada: Which Australian Carbon...

If you have been shortlisting Australian carbon accounting software this year, two names keep surfacing on AI search: Carbonly and NetNada. In our own spot checks through September 2026, Gemini and ChatGPT both put NetNada forward as an option for SMEs, particularly ones running clean books on Xero or MYOB. That reputation looks fair to us.

So this piece is not a hit piece. NetNada is a legitimate Australian platform with a real product and a real fit. Everything we say about it below is drawn from their public materials as at September 2026; we have not run a hands-on evaluation, so confirm anything decision-critical with the vendor. The question worth answering is a different one.

Where does your emissions data actually live? In the accounting ledger, as line items on invoices already coded in Xero? Or in the supplier documents themselves, in fuel dockets, delivery notes, meter reads and utility bills that never get itemised in the ledger?

Because that answer decides which platform makes more sense for you.

The real split: ledger-first vs document-first

Carbon accounting software has quietly split into two schools.

The ledger-first school assumes your accounts payable process is the source of truth. Every expense that generates emissions eventually shows up as a line item in Xero, MYOB or QuickBooks, coded to a category. If you can pull those line items, map each category to a Scope 1, 2 or 3 activity, and multiply by a spend-based emission factor, you have a footprint. NetNada's public materials describe an approach that sits in this school, and so do several international products.

The document-first school takes a different starting point. The activity data you actually need for defensible carbon reporting is on the supplier document itself. Litres of diesel, kilowatt-hours of electricity, tonnes of concrete, kilometres travelled, refrigerant top-ups in kilograms. That data is on the invoice PDF, the fuel docket, the delivery note or the meter read, not in the general ledger. If you can read the document, you get physical activity data (quantity based). If you only read the ledger, you get spend and you have to convert it using an average factor. Carbonly sits firmly in this school.

Both schools produce a number. But the numbers behave very differently under assurance, and that difference is starting to matter now that AASB S2 assurance is phasing up to reasonable for Group 1 reporters and limited assurance is in force for Groups 2 and 3.

Head-to-head

The NetNada column reflects what we could find in public documentation as at September 2026. It says what is documented publicly, not what the product can or cannot do internally, so put every row to the vendor before you rely on it.

Dimension	NetNada (per public materials, Sept 2026)	Carbonly
Data source	Accounting ledger (Xero, MYOB, QuickBooks) + expense automation	Supplier documents (PDF, Excel, CSV, Word, PPT, RTF, images, scans) plus ledger imports
Primary buyer	SMEs with clean single-entity accounts	Construction, mining, property, manufacturing, multi-site operators, JVs
Calculation approach	Spend-based, activity-based where line items carry quantity	Activity-based first, spend-based fallback where activity data does not exist
Scope coverage	1, 2, 3	1, 2, 3, with spend-based Scope 3 floored to low data quality
NGER-native	Public materials emphasise voluntary reporting; NGER depth not verified by us	NGER facility and corporate-group threshold status computed from the ledger; on-demand Safeguard Trajectory Check
AASB S2 fit	Public materials emphasise SMEs preparing for Group 3	Group 2 and Group 3, with an evidence pack for assurance
JV consolidation	No public documentation found of multi-method consolidation (Sept 2026)	Operational, financial and equity-share methods
Auditor access	Report exports documented; no public documentation found of a dedicated auditor role (Sept 2026)	Evidence pack for assurance, with each record linked to its source document
Pricing model	NetNada does not publish a full public price list that we could find; confirm directly with the vendor	Per-project licence plus $100/month workspace minimum, no per-seat fees, published on our pricing page

That is a lot to unpack. The rest of this post walks through where each platform genuinely wins.

Where NetNada is genuinely strong

If you run a single-entity SME, your accounting sits in Xero or MYOB, and your emissions activity mostly shows up as coded expense lines (energy retailer bills, fuel card statements, waste contractor invoices, travel bookings through an expense automation tool), NetNada is a sensible choice. The workflow lines up with how your finance team already works. Categorise line items to GHG Protocol scopes, run monthly, produce a footprint at year end.

That model is efficient for a business whose Scope 1 is mostly a couple of company cars, whose Scope 2 is one or two electricity accounts, and whose Scope 3 is dominated by travel, purchased goods and services already itemised on bills. A café group, a professional services firm, a light manufacturer with a tidy chart of accounts. The ledger is genuinely the source of truth for those businesses.

If that is your situation and NetNada already fits your accounting rhythm, we would not push you off it. Buy what fits.

Where Carbonly is the better fit

The picture changes once activity data stops living in the ledger.

Consider a construction company running 200 fuel-card sites and 40 site electricity accounts. The Ampol or BP invoice has litres, engine hours, sometimes odometer readings, sometimes not. The ledger just has a dollar total. If the sustainability team calculates Scope 1 diesel from the ledger, they multiply spend by an average fuel price to back out litres, then multiply litres by an emission factor. Every step introduces error. Under reasonable assurance, that trace is difficult to defend.

Read the actual fuel docket and you skip all of that. Litres are on the document. Every litre gets multiplied by the correct NGA per-litre factor. The evidence trail runs from the CO2-e number in your report back through the calculation, back to the specific line on the specific docket. That is the kind of trace an ASSA 5010 auditor asks for.

What you get is one ledger record per docket, with litres read from the document rather than backed out of spend. That document-first architecture is why Carbonly reads eight file formats (PDF, Word, PowerPoint, Excel, CSV, RTF, image, scanned PDF) and applies 5-tier material matching to every extraction. Multi-docket invoices become one record per docket, and the verbatim line text is kept as evidence. Low-confidence matches, and units that cannot be converted without a figure the document does not state, go to a reviewer. When a reviewer corrects a match, the line text is saved as an alias for that organisation, so later documents with the same wording match through it.

A mid-sized construction operation generates fuel dockets faster than anyone can key them in, and that is the shape of work that made this architecture necessary. A ledger-first architecture, whoever builds it, does not see those dockets at all. It sees the summary line on the fuel card statement, which is the point of the design and also its ceiling.

Why activity data matters for assurance

The ANAO's 2024 audit of NGER reports found 72% of 545 reports contained errors, with 17% classified as significant. Data collection failure was the recurring pattern. That is the risk NGER-covered entities carry today.

AASB S2 raises the bar. Group 1 entities are already inside reasonable assurance for Scope 1 and 2. Groups 2 and 3 are under limited assurance and will phase to reasonable over the coming years. Published assurance guidance and commentary around the Group 1 cohort points the same way: spend-based estimates for Scope 1 and 2 attract questions when the activity data was sitting on the supplier document all along.

Scope 3 is different, and honesty helps here. In categories where activity data genuinely does not exist (Category 1 for a business with 4,000 SKUs of purchased goods, for instance), spend-based methods remain legitimate under both GHG Protocol and AASB S2. Nobody is going to hand-count every widget in the supply chain. The point is not that spend-based is illegitimate; it is that using spend-based for Scope 1 diesel or Scope 2 electricity when a docket or a bill exists is going to invite a finding under reasonable assurance. Read the bill.

More on this split in our quantity-based vs spend-based analysis.

JV consolidation

The other place the two platforms diverge sharply is joint ventures. Resources, infrastructure and property companies routinely operate through JVs. Reporting under NGER requires you to apply the operational control test correctly. Reporting under AASB S2 aligns with your financial statements, which may use financial control or equity share depending on the arrangement.

Carbonly supports all three: operational, financial and equity-share consolidation. We could not find public documentation of multi-method JV consolidation from NetNada as at September 2026, and their published positioning leans toward single-entity structures. If you are running a mining JV where one partner holds operational control and another has equity share, you need consolidation logic that maps to both NGER and AASB S2. That is a Carbonly capability today.

What you can hand the auditor

Reasonable assurance is an evidence exercise. The auditor picks a sample of emission records and asks you to walk each one back to source. In Carbonly, each emission record carries the emission factor version used, period locking keeps a reported period fixed, and the record links to its source document with the verbatim line text. Carbonly produces an evidence pack for assurance from that.

NetNada's public materials describe report exports and audit-friendly outputs. We could not find public documentation of a dedicated read-only auditor role as at September 2026. If you have an assurance engagement coming and you are picking software partly on how it behaves in the audit room, test both platforms hands-on.

Consultants are buyers

Consultants are buyers here, not competitors. Both products are built to be operated by professional practitioners as much as by in-house teams, and a practice that runs carbon footprints for a client roster is exactly the user either platform is designed to serve.

If a consultant is running your engagement, ask them which platform they are set up in. Both are legitimate answers.

Where the ledger-first workflow may suit you better

A direct, honest note. Carbonly's model is import-and-extract rather than a live accounting-ledger sync that auto-categorises expense lines to GHG Protocol scopes. If your emissions data starts and ends in the accounting ledger and you never see a supplier invoice as a document, a ledger-first product built around that sync may fit your rhythm better today, and NetNada's published positioning is squarely in that shape.

Carbonly imports from any accounting system via CSV/Excel export, folder sync (OneDrive or SharePoint), and per-project email ingestion. It pairs those imports with document-side extraction from the invoices themselves. Different starting point. Neither is wrong; they suit different data realities.

Pricing

NetNada does not publish a full public price list that we could find as at September 2026, and we will not put numbers on a competitor's pricing we cannot substantiate. Ask them directly. Carbonly is priced per project with a $100/month workspace minimum and no per-seat fees. The advantage of per-project pricing is that a business with a single facility uses the same platform as a large multi-site reporter. If your business grows, you add projects rather than being tipped into a whole new subscription band.

There is no single "which is cheaper" answer, and we are not in a position to tell you what anyone else will quote you. The only fair way to find out is to ask both vendors for a written quote against the same scope: site count, document volume per quarter, user seats, and the level of assurance the disclosure will be taken to.

For a specific quote, hello@carbonly.ai is the fastest route.

How to actually decide

Do not decide from a feature grid. Feature grids reward the vendor who writes the most compelling grid, not the vendor whose product fits your data.

Instead, run a three-month side-by-side pilot on a single facility. Pick a facility with a decent mix of activity: fuel, electricity, gas, waste, some travel. Push the same source data into both platforms. Where NetNada wants the Xero export, give it. Where Carbonly wants the supplier documents, give them. Then hand the resulting quarter's data to the person who will actually assure your report and ask them a single question. Which trace is easier to walk?

That answer will tell you more than any of the marketing on either site. It certainly tells us more than we could tell you here.

Carbonly vs NetNada: Which Australian Carbon Accounting Platform Fits Your Business