Allocate supplier emissions (Scope 3)

A supplier reports the total emissions of its company. For your Scope 3 Category 1 inventory, however, only the share attributable to your purchases counts. Allocation moves exactly that share into your inventory as primary data.

Prerequisites

• The supplier's submission has been reviewed as “Approved”.
• The supplier has the engagement status “Completed”.
• You are signed in to your team and have the administrator role.

Understanding the allocation logic

• “Spend-based” allocates based on your spend in relation to the supplier's revenue.
• “Physical quantity” allocates based on the purchased quantity in relation to total production. This method corresponds to higher data quality under the GHG Protocol.

Step by step

1. Open the supplier detail page and click “Allocate emissions” in the header area. The side dialog “Allocate emissions” opens on the right.
2. In the section “Summary of emissions data”, check “Supplier”, “Engagement status”, “Validated total emissions (tCO2e)” and “Data quality rating”.
3. In the section “Allocation method”, select the “Method” – “Spend-based” is preselected, or choose “Physical quantity”.
4. For spend-based allocation, complete the mandatory fields in the section “Spend-based allocation”: “Organization annual spend” (prefilled with the annual spend stored for the supplier) and “Supplier total revenue” (prefilled from the supplier's response). preeco calculates “Allocation rate” and “Allocated emissions (tCO2e)” automatically; both are not editable.
5. In the section “Impact comparison”, enter your previous spend-based Scope 3 Category 1 estimate for this supplier under “Previous estimate (tCO2e)” to see the change.
6. Click “Apply allocation”. Use “Cancel” to discard the process.

Impact on the Scope 3 inventory

After saving, the dialog “Allocation saved” appears and asks “Recalculate Scope 3 now?”.

• “Yes, recalculate” updates the Scope 3 emissions records of the affected reporting period immediately.
• “No, postpone” closes the dialog; you can trigger the recalculation later in the Greenhouse Gas Emissions module.

The allocated emissions replace the spend-based estimate for this supplier in the Scope 3 Category 1 inventory. The recalculation affects the reporting period of the underlying data request. In the “Timeline of engagement activities”, the entry “Validated” is logged with the method and allocated quantity.

Practical tip: before allocating, enter your previous estimate in the field “Previous estimate (tCO2e)” – the difference between the estimated value and primary data is a strong argument for further supplier engagement when communicating with management.