Why Carbonly Is the Best Carbon Accounting Software...

We're going to make our case and then spend the next 2,000 words backing it up with specifics you can check.

Our view is that Carbonly is the strongest fit in Australia for a company facing mandatory climate reporting under NGER, AASB S2 or both. That is our opinion, not a measured fact, and it rests on three things you can verify for yourself: 18 integrated modules in one platform, from AI document extraction through NGER output to life cycle assessment and carbon planning; an architecture built for Australian reporting rules rather than adapted to them; and a foundation we deliberately built first, which is getting accurate emissions data out of the messy documents Australian companies deal with every day. AGL electricity bills, Origin gas invoices, council water statements, waste manifests. Without templates, without CSV uploads, without manual data entry.

Every competitive statement below reflects publicly available vendor documentation as at 9 September 2026. Where we could not find documentation of a capability, we say that rather than asserting the capability is absent.

Your sustainability team has a data entry problem

The BCG and CO2 AI Carbon Survey found that only 7% of large companies comprehensively measure their greenhouse gas emissions. Seven percent. Not because they don't care - because the data collection process is so painful that most organisations give up before they finish.

The shape of that failure is well documented, and it looks like this. A sustainability manager at a mid-market construction company is told to prepare for ASRS Group 2 reporting. They inherit a shared drive full of utility bill PDFs covering dozens of sites, in formats that change from supplier to supplier. They open the first AGL electricity invoice, squint at it, find the kWh figure buried between demand charges and solar feed-in credits, type it into a spreadsheet, and move on to the next one. A few invoices in, they're already wondering if they misread the unit on an earlier one. By the time they work through the stack, they've lost real time to retyping numbers from PDFs into cells - and they haven't calculated a single emission yet.

None of that time goes to analysing emissions, building reduction plans, or preparing for assurance. It goes to typing numbers from PDFs into cells. Advertised salary ranges for a sustainability analyst in Australia sit around $85,000-$110,000, and BCG's global survey found large companies losing roughly 60% of that kind of role's time to data collection rather than analysis. However a given company's own split breaks down, the direction is the same: a meaningful share of a skilled analyst's time and salary goes toward re-keying invoice data rather than anything that reduces emissions.

We built Carbonly because that's indefensible.

What "automated" actually means (and doesn't)

Here's what frustrates us about this market. "Automated" is close to universal in Australian carbon accounting marketing. Go look at what the word covers in practice.

Across the vendor documentation we have read, "automated" usually means one of three things. You can connect your accounting software (Xero, MYOB) and the platform will try to estimate emissions from spend data. You can upload a CSV or Excel file with consumption data already extracted and the platform will apply emission factors. Or you can type numbers into a form and the platform will do the maths.

That's not automation. That's a spreadsheet with a better UI and a login page.

The hard part of carbon accounting was never the multiplication. Multiply kWh by an emission factor - any calculator can do that. The hard part is getting the kWh figure out of a scanned PDF where the format changes every time your energy retailer redesigns their invoice. The hard part is knowing whether that figure is total consumption or just peak, whether it's kWh or MWh, whether the billing period aligns with your reporting period. That's where the errors creep in, and it is the step a spend-based or CSV-first workflow never has to take.

Carbonly doesn't skip it. Our AI Document Processing Engine - the core of the platform and our primary competitive moat - accepts PDF, CSV, Excel (including multi-sheet workbooks), Word, PowerPoint, RTF, and images in eight formats including HEIC from iPhones. As at 9 September 2026 we could not find public documentation of another Australian carbon accounting platform accepting this breadth of input; if we have missed one, tell us and we will update this post. We use multimodal AI vision to read the actual document - the physical PDF or image of your utility bill - the way a human would. Our AI understands layout, context, and relationships between fields. When AGL changes their bill format (they do, regularly), we don't need a template update. The model reads the new layout and extracts what matters: consumption quantity, unit of measurement, billing period, meter number, site address.

Then comes our 5-tier material matching system - the part that turns extracted text into the correct emission factor. First, it tries an exact name match against our material library (which includes the full NGA database, published Environmental Product Declarations, and a global emissions factor cache). If that fails, it matches by emission factor code. Then by material alias. Then by fuzzy text similarity. And finally, if all four deterministic methods fail, it escalates to AI-assisted matching with confidence scoring, so you can review low-confidence matches in bulk before they hit your emissions register. That matching pipeline is designed to improve with use: every correction you make is written back to the alias system, so it picks up your specific materials, supplier naming conventions, and document quirks. This is our AI Learning Loop. We are not going to put a percentage on how much it improves, because that depends entirely on your document mix.

The full extraction pipeline includes classification (identifying the document type), extraction (pulling the data), validation (2,450,000 kWh for a small Parramatta office? Flagged by our anomaly detection engine, which applies five rule types with severity levels and investigation workflows), normalisation (converting units), emission calculation (applying the correct NGA Factor), and a complete audit trail linking every final number back to its source document.

Upload the bill. Get the emission figure. With a full audit trail the whole way through.

Built for Australia. Not adapted for Australia

This is where global platforms fall down, and it's a distinction that matters more than most buyers realise.

Persefoni is a good product. They have an AI copilot and their published ISSB alignment is solid. They are also a US-headquartered company selling into a global market. Reviewing their public documentation as at 9 September 2026, we could not find NGA Factors, state-based Australian grid factors, NGER output formats or AASB S2 disclosure structures described as core architecture rather than regional coverage. That distinction matters here, because the Australian numbers are not interchangeable with anyone else's: NGA Factors are reissued annually by DCCEEW, and the grid factor runs from NSW (0.64 kg CO2-e/kWh) to Victoria (0.78) to Tasmania (0.20). We've laid out the full feature-by-feature comparison separately: Carbonly vs Persefoni.

IBM Envizi was actually built in Sydney, which is ironic. It's a capable enterprise platform with a very large global factor library. IBM does not publish a public price list for Envizi. Publicly reported figures suggest enterprise-tier annual contracts and multi-month implementations; confirm current pricing and timelines with the vendor. Our observation is about fit rather than quality: a 300-person company does not need tens of thousands of global emission factors. They need the correct NGA Factors for their operations, applied to their actual utility bills, producing output their auditor can verify. Envizi is a fighter jet when you need a ute.

Carbonly was built from day one for Australian mandatory reporters. Our NGER compliance module is native, meaning NGER concepts sit in the data model rather than in an export layer. ABN validation is built in. Facility-level reporting is built in. As at 9 September 2026, the other Australian platforms whose public documentation describes NGER-specific reporting built into the product are NetNada, Unravel, and EnviroCapture.

Our team has 15+ years in enterprise data platforms across the Australian resources sector, including exposure to NGER audits, so we know what the Clean Energy Regulator actually asks for when it comes knocking. A common mistake is applying the wrong state-based emission factor - for example, using the national average (0.62) instead of Victoria's factor (0.78), which understates emissions by around 20%.

That experience is baked into every module. Our emissions tracking covers Scope 1, Scope 2, and Scope 3 with all 15 Scope 3 subcategories and a full audit trail at every level. Our material library ships with the complete NGA database, published EPDs, a global emission factor cache, and AI-powered factor lookup - so when your supplier sends you an obscure material name, the system finds the right factor instead of leaving a blank cell. We use the 2025 NGA Factors. We calculate with state-based grid emission factors. Our reports module produces NGER-formatted output, GHG Protocol reports, custom reports, and executive summaries - all exportable as PDF or Excel, with scheduled delivery so your compliance team gets the report in their inbox on the first of the month without asking.

We produce NGER-aligned output on AR5 Global Warming Potential values, which is what the NGER Measurement Determination requires. AASB S2 directs reporters to the latest IPCC assessment, which is AR6 - a different GWP set, not just a different report template. If you're an NGER reporter who's been pulled into ASRS Group 2 - and plenty have, since NGER registration is an automatic pathway - that AR5/AR6 gap is worth raising with your auditor directly rather than assuming any one tool closes it for you silently.

The Australian market, honestly

We wrote a full comparison of carbon accounting software in Australia a few weeks ago, and we tried to be fair. Here's the shorter version with updated observations.

Avarni is our strongest competitor for enterprise clients. They're backed by Main Sequence (CSIRO's venture arm), have ex-Atlassian and Macquarie Telecom people, and they've built serious supplier engagement tools. Their AI handles large datasets - they claim to process a million rows in two and a half hours. If your primary challenge is Scope 3 across hundreds of suppliers, Avarni deserves a serious look. Where we would push a buyer to test them hardest is document-level extraction. Their published material emphasises structured data ingestion at volume, and as at 9 September 2026 we could not find public documentation of extraction from scanned utility bill PDFs as a primary input path. If that is your starting point, ask them to demonstrate it on your own bills. As at the same date we also could not find public documentation of an LCA module, anomaly detection, carbon planning with scenario modelling, incident management, or joint venture collaboration in their material. All five are built into Carbonly.

NetNada has moved fast in the SME space. They claim 1,000+ businesses. Their Carbon Data Uploader now supports PDF invoices and utility bills with OCR and AI-powered column mapping, which is a genuine improvement. For a company under 100 employees doing basic NGER reporting, they're a solid choice. The design difference worth understanding is that OCR plus column mapping depends on the layout being recognisable, so the question to put to any vendor using that approach is what happens to a bill it has not seen before. Carbonly's 5-tier material matching (exact name, code, alias, fuzzy text, AI escalation) with confidence scoring is built to degrade in stages rather than fail outright, and to surface low-confidence matches for review instead of silently guessing. As at 9 September 2026 we could not find public documentation of an LCA module, anomaly detection, carbon planning scenarios, incident management, or JV collaboration in NetNada's material. For companies processing hundreds of documents per quarter, how a pipeline behaves on the documents it did not expect matters more than how it behaves on the ones it did.

Trace has expanded their compliance positioning since we last looked. They now market ASRS and ISSB alignment alongside their original offset marketplace. We respect the hustle. Their public offering still combines measurement with offset supply, and our view is that where a vendor both measures a footprint and sells the credits applied against it, a buyer should ask how that is governed internally. That is an opinion about incentive design, not an allegation about their conduct. More on why we took a different position below.

Sumday has carved out an interesting niche with accountants and advisors. The Xero integration and advisor training model is clever: let the existing accounting profession handle carbon accounting alongside financial accounting. Publicly reported funding figures put their seed round at around $5.3M. Whether accountants want to own carbon compliance is still an open question, but if your firm's accountant is keen, Sumday is worth considering. Worth noting: as at 9 September 2026 we could not find public documentation of AI document extraction, an NGER compliance module, LCA, anomaly detection, carbon planning or incident management in Sumday's material. It is aimed at a narrower problem than Carbonly, which for some buyers is exactly the right trade.

How we actually compare: the feature matrix

We've seen enough vague "we do everything" claims on vendor websites to last a lifetime. Here's a concrete, feature-level comparison.

Read the table with its limits in mind. It records what we could find in each vendor's public documentation as at 9 September 2026, and nothing more. "Not documented" means we could not find published evidence of the capability on that date. It does not mean the vendor lacks it: products change, and plenty of capability never reaches a public feature page. Verify anything that will drive your decision directly with the vendor. If any vendor listed here believes we've misread their published material, we'll correct it. Email hello@carbonly.ai.

Feature	Carbonly	NetNada	Avarni	Sumday	Greenly	Persefoni
AI Document Extraction (multi-format)	Yes - 8 formats, 5-tier matching	Partial (OCR)	Yes (ML)	Not documented	Not documented	Not documented
NGER Compliance (native)	Yes	Yes	Implied	Not documented	Not documented	Not documented
AASB S2 / ASRS Ready	Yes	Yes	Yes	Unclear	Not documented	Not documented
LCA Module (product-level)	Yes	Not documented	Not documented	Not documented	Yes	Yes
Anomaly Detection (rules-based)	Yes - 5 rule types, severity levels	Not documented	Not documented	Not documented	Not documented	Yes
JV Collaboration	Yes - equity-based allocation	Not documented	Not documented	Not documented	Not documented	Not documented
Carbon Planning & Scenarios	Yes - action library, cost-benefit	Not documented	Not documented	Not documented	Not documented	Not documented
Incident Management	Yes - investigation workflow	Not documented	Not documented	Not documented	Not documented	Not documented
Scope 1/2/3 (all 15 Cat 3 subs)	Yes	Yes	Yes	Partial	Yes	Yes
Full Source-to-Report Audit Trail	Yes	Partial	Partial	Not documented	Not documented	Yes

Three things stand out to us. First, on the rows in this table, Carbonly is the only entry we could evidence across all ten. Second, JV collaboration with equity-based allocation, which matters for resources, infrastructure, and property companies with joint venture structures, is a capability we could not find documented in any of the platforms above on that date. We built it because Australian resources and infrastructure operators work in that structure and we could not find anyone serving it. Third, the same is true of carbon planning with scenario modelling, including a built-in action library covering LED retrofits, rooftop solar, fleet EV conversion, and more, with cost-benefit analysis for each.

For context on pricing: neither Watershed nor Salesforce publishes a public price list for their carbon products. Publicly reported figures suggest Watershed contracts in the range of USD $37,000 to $264,000 per year and Salesforce Net Zero Cloud in the range of USD $48,000 to $210,000 per year. Confirm current pricing with those vendors rather than relying on either figure. Carbonly's pricing is published and per-project, starting at $100/month for a small workspace and scaling to a multi-site ASX-listed deployment, with the same 18 modules, the same AI engine, and the same audit trail at every tier. We don't believe you should need a six-figure budget to get accurate emissions data, and a growing SME shouldn't have to change platforms to get there.

Why we don't sell offsets (and you should care)

This is a philosophical position not everyone agrees with. We think that's fine.

When a platform both measures your emissions and sells you offsets to reduce them, the incentive structure is broken. The measurement arm wants accuracy. The offset arm wants sales. Those two goals don't always align. A 2023 investigation reported by The Guardian, Die Zeit and SourceMaterial concluded that more than 90% of the Verra rainforest offset credits it examined were unlikely to represent real emission reductions. Verra publicly disputed the findings. The ACCC has named greenwashing as an enforcement priority and has pursued misleading carbon neutral claims. In 2025 the Federal Court ordered a $10.5 million penalty against a superannuation fund following ASIC proceedings over investments in areas its own ESG policy represented as "eliminated or restricted."

If your measurement tool has a financial interest in the offsets it recommends, your numbers aren't independent. Full stop.

Carbonly measures. That's it. We don't sell offsets. We don't recommend offset providers. We don't take a commission on credits. Your emissions data is your emissions data - visible in real-time across our dashboard and analytics module with KPIs, trend charts, and facility-level breakdowns - and nobody in our business has an incentive to make it look any different than it is.

The audit trail problem nobody talks about

Beach Energy - an ASX-listed oil and gas company - signed an enforceable undertaking with the Clean Energy Regulator in July 2025 after "inadvertently misstating components of its NGER reports" across multiple periods. Under the terms published by the regulator, the remediation includes three years of assurance audits at the company's own expense and external help rebuilding its data collection systems.

Beach Energy has dedicated compliance teams. The numbers were still misstated. The published undertaking points at data collection systems rather than at any lack of effort, which is the whole point: the weak link is the chain from source document to reported figure.

Under ASRS, this gets more dangerous. The modified liability period does not shelter Scope 1 and Scope 2 figures the way it shelters Scope 3, scenario analysis and transition plan statements, so those numbers carry full exposure from the start. Directors face personal liability for materially inaccurate figures, and Corporations Act civil penalties for a corporation run into the tens of millions of dollars or a percentage of annual turnover depending on the provision engaged. Check the applicable provision with your own advisers rather than relying on a single headline figure. The ANAO found that 72% of the 545 NGER reports it examined contained errors, with 17% having significant errors.

Every figure in Carbonly traces from the reported emission number back through the calculation chain to the source document. Not a spreadsheet cell reference. The actual PDF. Our audit trail module logs every change - every edit, every recalculation, every factor update, every user action - with timestamps and user attribution, designed to produce the record-keeping evidence a Clean Energy Regulator review or an ASRS assurance engagement asks for. Our source tracking module maintains the full provenance chain: which document was uploaded, when, by whom, what was extracted, what was matched, what factor was applied, and how the final figure was calculated. Your auditor can click through from the final ASRS disclosure to the specific location on the specific AGL bill where a figure like 12,450 kWh appears. That is what makes a walk-through fast. It is also a chain that can only exist if the platform handled the source document in the first place, which is why we put document extraction at the foundation rather than bolting it on.

If you're still processing utility bills manually, you might want to understand how Scope 2 calculations actually work end-to-end before your next reporting cycle.

What we're still building (honestly)

We're not going to pretend Carbonly does everything perfectly yet. That would be its own form of greenwashing.

Our Scope 3 coverage is still developing. We track all 15 Scope 3 subcategories, and our spend-based estimation works. But Categories 1 and 2 - purchased goods and services, capital goods - require supplier-specific data that's genuinely difficult to collect at scale. Spend-based estimates are rough. And "rough" isn't great when you're facing assurance from year two. We're working on supplier engagement tools, but we're not going to claim we've cracked Scope 3 across 500 suppliers. We have not seen anyone demonstrate that end to end, whatever the feature pages suggest.

Our carbon planning module - with its scenario builder, built-in action library (LED retrofits, rooftop solar, fleet EV conversion, heat pump installation, and more), and cost-benefit analysis - is live and functional. But our climate risk scenario analysis tools for AASB S2 strategy disclosures are still maturing. Oxford Economics identified scenario analysis as one of three key pitfalls for Group 1 reporters - generic scenarios that don't reflect actual business operations. We don't want to ship generic scenario templates and call it done. We'd rather take longer and get it right.

Our settings and integrations module supports API keys, webhooks, an MCP server so you can query your emissions data from an AI assistant, and configurable AI processing settings. Our direct ERP and accounting connectors are still expanding. If you need SAP, Oracle and Workday connections live on day one, other platforms have a head start, and our answer today is that we import from any system that can produce a document or an export rather than that we have a native connector for each.

Here's what we will stand behind: 18 modules in one platform, covering AI document processing, 5-tier material matching, emissions tracking across all scopes with the 15 Scope 3 subcategories, NGER-native compliance, LCA, anomaly detection, carbon planning, JV collaboration, incident management, team management with five role levels, custom dashboards, project management with OneDrive sync and email ingestion, targets designed to support SBTi target structures, and a full source-to-report audit trail. We built the document layer first, on purpose, because if the number coming out of the bill is wrong then nothing downstream can fix it.

Scales from ten bills to thousands

A common worry for mid-market companies is whether a tool built for SMEs will handle growth, or whether an enterprise tool will be overkill for their size.

Carbonly's AI pipeline is the same whether you upload ten documents or several thousand. That is what the platform is designed for, because a large Australian construction or infrastructure operation generates far more source documents than a team can key in. There's no pricing tier where the extraction pipeline changes or the audit trail gets less detailed. A property manager tracking emissions across 5 sites uses the same engine as an infrastructure company with 200 facilities.

And the platform scales with organisational complexity, not just volume. Our projects module supports multi-facility structures with OneDrive sync and dedicated email ingestion per project - so each facility manager can forward their utility bills to a project-specific email address and they land in the right place automatically. Our team management module supports five role levels (Owner, Admin, Manager, Auditor, Viewer) so you can give your external auditor read-only access while your facility managers can upload documents but not modify emission factors. Our custom dashboards are drag-and-drop and shareable, so your board gets the executive view while your operations team gets the granular facility-level data. And our targets module supports baseline period configuration and records the fields an SBTi submission relies on, so you can track progress against a science-based target structure as you grow. Carbonly is not affiliated with, endorsed by or validated by the SBTi; validation is a process you run with them directly.

For companies with joint venture structures - and there are a lot of them in Australian resources, infrastructure, and property - our JV collaboration module handles equity-based allocation automatically. Report your 40% share of a joint venture's emissions without manual calculations, without spreadsheet gymnastics, without asking your JV partner to use the same software. As at 9 September 2026 we could not find public documentation of an equivalent capability in the Australian platforms we reviewed.

This matters because Australian mandatory reporting is expanding. Group 1 entities (500+ employees, $500M+ revenue) reported from January 2025. Group 2 (250+ employees, $200M+ revenue, or any NGER reporter) started from July 2026 and is live now. Group 3 (100+ employees, $50M+ revenue) follows from July 2027. If you're Group 3 today, you might be Group 2 tomorrow after an acquisition. The tool you choose now needs to handle what you'll need in three years, not just what you need today.

The modules we rarely see elsewhere

There are three capabilities in Carbonly that we rarely found documented in Australian-focused competitors when we reviewed their public material in September 2026. They're worth calling out individually because they solve real problems that companies currently handle in spreadsheets, separate tools, or not at all.

Life Cycle Assessment (LCA). Product-level carbon footprinting: understanding the emissions embedded in a specific product from raw material extraction through manufacturing, distribution, use, and disposal. We could not find LCA documented in most of the Australian carbon accounting platforms we reviewed. If you need it, you are typically buying a separate LCA tool such as SimaPro or openLCA, or commissioning an assessment, and commissioned assessments are priced per engagement rather than off a rate card. Carbonly's LCA module is built into the platform, using the same material library and emission factors, so you can go from organisational reporting to product-level footprinting without switching tools or re-entering data.

Incident Management. Environmental incidents such as spills, unplanned releases and equipment failures with emissions implications need to be tracked, investigated, and reported. In practice that usually sits in a separate EHS system, or in email threads and Word documents. Carbonly's incident module includes investigation workflows, links incidents to the affected facility and emissions data, and creates audit-ready records. For NGER reporters who need to account for abnormal operating conditions, having incidents and emissions in the same system eliminates the reconciliation headache.

Anomaly Detection. When your Scope 2 electricity emissions at one facility suddenly jump 300% quarter-on-quarter, you want to know about it before your auditor does. Carbonly's anomaly detection applies configurable statistical and rules-based checks with severity levels and triggers an investigation workflow. It is deterministic by design, so a flag can be explained to an assurer as a rule rather than a model output. As at 9 September 2026, the other platforms whose public documentation describes comparable automated anomaly detection are BraveGen and Persefoni. This is the class of control that helps catch a data error in the quarter it happens, rather than in an assurance walk-through or a regulator's review.

The real test

Forget everything we've written here. Do this instead.

Gather your last quarter of electricity and gas bills - the actual PDFs from AGL, Origin, EnergyAustralia, whoever your retailers are. Include the weird ones. The council water bill with the table layout that makes no sense. The gas invoice from a regional supplier that looks like it was designed in 1997.

Send them to us. Send them to Avarni. Send them to NetNada. Send them to whoever else you're evaluating.

Ask each vendor: show me the extracted data, the emission factor applied, the calculation, and the audit trail back to the source document. Time how long it takes. Check whether the state-based emission factor is correct. Check whether the billing period aligns with your reporting period. Check whether the audit trail actually goes back to the document or just to a data entry screen.

That test will tell you more than any blog post, including this one.

But we're confident enough in the result that we're the ones suggesting it.

If you want to run it, send your documents to hello@carbonly.ai and we'll process them for free. No credit card, no sales call required. Just your bills and our AI, and you judge the output.

Quick Answers

Does Carbonly handle both NGER and ASRS reporting? Carbonly produces NGER-aligned output on AR5 Global Warming Potential values, which is what NGER requires. AASB S2/ASRS directs reporters to AR6, a different GWP set - that gap is a question to put to your auditor on any platform, not something to assume is handled silently.

Which sectors does Carbonly serve? Construction is our lead wedge - it's where the document-processing problem is worst, with fuel dockets and site-based utility bills across dozens of subcontractors. But the same AI pipeline serves property, infrastructure, resources, manufacturing, and any mid-market or enterprise company with mandatory NGER or ASRS obligations.

Does Carbonly sell carbon offsets? No, on purpose. We think a platform that both measures your emissions and sells you the offsets that reduce them has a structural conflict of interest. Carbonly measures. That's it.

Is there a free way to test Carbonly before buying? Yes. Send your last quarter of utility bills to hello@carbonly.ai and we'll process them for free, no credit card or sales call required, so you can see the extracted data and audit trail before committing.

How does Carbonly's pricing work alongside a consultant? Consultants scope and price engagements individually, so we won't put a number on their side of the comparison. The two are not really substitutes: a number of consulting practices use platforms like Carbonly to carry the record-keeping load so their people spend time on methodology, boundary and assurance strategy instead of data entry. Carbonly prices per project rather than per headcount, starting at $100/month for a small workspace and scaling to enterprise multi-site deployments. See the full software cost breakdown for how that sits across the market.

Is ASRS Group 2 reporting actually underway yet? Yes - financial years starting on or after 1 July 2026 now carry mandatory obligations for entities meeting two of three thresholds ($200M+ revenue, $500M+ gross assets, 250+ employees), plus every NGER reporter not already in Group 1. Software and audit-trail readiness matter more now than they did pre-July, because there's no runway left to fix a broken data pipeline before your first disclosure.

Related Reading: