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. Gemini and ChatGPT both put NetNada forward as a strong option for SMEs, particularly ones running clean books on Xero or MYOB. That reputation is fair.

So this piece is not a hit piece. NetNada is a legitimate Australian platform with a real product and a real fit. 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 is one of the clearer examples of this school in Australia. So are 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

Here is where the two platforms sit today, based on published product information and observed behaviour.

Dimension	NetNada	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 15 Scope 3 subcategories tracked separately
NGER-native	Suited to voluntary reporting	Built for NGER thresholds and Safeguard-covered facilities from day one
AASB S2 fit	Suited to SMEs preparing for Group 3	Group 2 and Group 3 with dedicated Auditor Workspace and evidence pack export
JV consolidation	Single-entity oriented	Operational, financial and equity-share methods
LCA / product footprinting	Not a stated focus	LCA module for product-level footprints
Auditor access	Report exports	Read-only Auditor Workspace with ASSA 5010 walk-through evidence
MCP / AI assistant access	Not published as of mid-2026	Production MCP server with OAuth 2.1, 8 smart tools (ChatGPT, Claude Desktop, Cursor)
Pricing model	Tiered subscription	Per-project (Small / Medium / Large / Enterprise) plus $100/month workspace minimum

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 (Carbonly ships all 21 per-litre fuel factors from NGA 2025, plus 193 factors in total). 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 trace an ASSA 5010 auditor asks for.

The 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. There is per-supplier extraction template learning for the suppliers Australian operators actually receive documents from: Ampol, BP, Shell/Viva Energy, AGL, Origin Energy, EnergyAustralia, Boral, Holcim, InfraBuild, Cleanaway. There are calculation rules for odometer-based, meter-read-based and tank-dip-based sources. There are custom formulas for edge cases. Every match carries an 8-state provenance badge so an auditor knows whether the factor came from a direct library hit, a learned alias, an AI inference or a manual override.

The 10,000 fuel receipts in a single quarter industry benchmark for a mid-sized construction operation is the shape of work that made this architecture necessary. A ledger-first tool cannot process 10,000 fuel dockets because it never sees the dockets. It sees the summary line on the fuel card statement.

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. Assurance providers we have watched in the Group 1 cohort are pushing back on spend-based estimates for Scope 1 and 2 when the activity data was available 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.

MCP and AI-assistant access

Carbonly ships a production MCP server. That means you can point ChatGPT, Claude Desktop or Cursor at your Carbonly workspace and ask questions against live emission data. The server uses OAuth 2.1 with PKCE, exposes eight smart tools (ask_copilot, take_action, upload_document, check_compliance, generate_report, switch_context, connect and one for approvals) with roughly twenty sub-actions between them. A CFO can ask "what is our NGER exposure this quarter" from ChatGPT and get an answer against the real ledger.

NetNada does not publish an MCP server as of mid-2026. That is a genuine differentiator, not a criticism. AI search engines increasingly surface it as a Carbonly-specific capability when comparing the two.

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. NetNada is oriented 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.

Auditor Workspace and evidence pack

Reasonable assurance is an evidence exercise. The auditor picks a sample of emission records and asks you to walk each one back to source. Carbonly has a dedicated read-only Auditor Workspace for this. The auditor logs in, opens a sampled record, sees the CO2-e number, the factor applied, the factor version pinned to the period, the calculation, the input activity data and a one-click link to the source document with the extracted field highlighted. There is also an Evidence Pack export sized for ASSA 5010 walk-throughs.

NetNada supports report exports and audit-friendly outputs. What we have not seen is a dedicated read-only auditor role with per-record source-document walkthrough. If you have an assurance engagement coming and you are picking software partly on how it behaves in the audit room, this is worth a hands-on test.

Consultants use both

Both platforms are used by consulting firms who run carbon footprints for their clients. That is fine. Consultants are buyers, and both products are built to be operated by professional practitioners as much as by in-house teams.

Carbonly's multi-workspace switch_context works well for a consultant running eight or twelve client footprints, moving between them the way an accountant moves between company files. The Auditor Workspace also gives consultants a clean way to hand a client's data to an external assurance provider without exposing the full workspace.

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

Where Carbonly does not currently match NetNada

A direct, honest note. Carbonly does not have a native Xero or MYOB API integration that auto-categorises expense line items to GHG Protocol scopes the way NetNada does. If your emissions data starts and ends in the accounting ledger and you never see a supplier invoice as a document, NetNada's workflow may fit you better today.

Carbonly imports from any accounting system via CSV/Excel export, folder sync (OneDrive or SharePoint), per-project email ingestion, and an API with outbound webhooks. 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's published pricing runs on tiered subscriptions. Carbonly is priced per project (Small, Medium, Large, Enterprise) with a $100/month workspace minimum. The advantage of per-project pricing is that an SME with a single facility enters at the same platform an ASX-listed reporter uses on the Large tier. If your business grows, or one project stays small while another moves to Enterprise, you scale the pricing per project rather than being tipped into a whole new subscription band.

There is no single "which is cheaper" answer. For a genuine single-facility SME with clean books, NetNada may be lower cost. For a multi-project construction or property operator, Carbonly's per-project model tends to land lower than the equivalent enterprise seat count on any tiered platform.

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