How ClubCarbon works
ClubCarbon turns the invoices your club already receives into a GHG-Protocol-aligned carbon footprint. No spreadsheets, no consultants, drop a bill in, check what was read, and the emissions maths is done for you.
Because those same invoices carry the amounts paid, you get a second answer for free: where the club's money is going, category by category, next to the emissions. The two rarely match. A club's biggest bill often isn't its biggest emitter, and seeing them side by side is usually what turns a reporting exercise into a decision about which supplier, tariff or piece of kit to look at first.
Watch it in 30 seconds
| Month | Quantity | kgCO₂e |
|---|---|---|
| Jan 2025 | 1,346 kWh | 301.7 |
| Feb 2025 | 1,249 kWh | 279.9 |
| Mar 2025 | 1,073 kWh | 240.5 (est.) |
| … | 9 more months |
1/6Your club dashboard, plain-English drop zones, one per emission source
Scripted walkthrough of the real flow, pause it or click the dots to step through at your own pace.
Using the app
- 1Add your club
One club per organisation. Everything you upload sits under the club, and each club gets its own dashboard and reports.
- 2Gather your invoices
Electricity and gas bills, heating-oil deliveries, water bills, waste collection invoices, fuel receipts for mowers and minibuses, coach-hire invoices for away games. Annual statements are ideal, one file can fill a whole year. PDFs, photos and CSVs all work.
- 3Drop each document into its category
Drag the file onto the matching card on your dashboard (or click the card to browse). The engine reads it and breaks the consumption into monthly records.
- 4Review before anything is saved
You always see what was extracted (supplier, months, quantities, and the emissions each row would add) before confirming. Edit quantities, fix months, or discard entirely. Nothing enters your records without your say-so.
- 5Watch the dashboard build up
Scope 1/2/3 totals, a month-by-month chart, and a document list where every figure can be traced back to (or deleted along with) its source invoice.
- 6Generate your report
The annual report includes monthly tables per category, the exact emission factors used with their sources, data-coverage notes, and the Scope 3 exclusions statement. Print it or save as PDF from your browser.
Behind the scenes: what happens when you drop an invoice
For anyone who wants to know what the engine is actually doing. This is the full pipeline, in order.
The original document is saved unmodified in the club's evidence folder (data/uploads). The evidence trail is the point: every reported number must be traceable to a source document.
The file is sent to the Claude API (model: claude-opus-4-8) with instructions specific to the category you dropped it into. It identifies the supplier, the billing period, and the consumption figures, including day/night meter registers, estimated (E) vs actual (A) readings, and unit quirks.
A year-long statement becomes twelve rows. A bill spanning two months is pro-rated across them by calendar days and flagged as estimated. Units are converted to a canonical unit per source (kWh, litres, m³, tonnes, km). The output is validated against a strict schema, the model cannot return free-form text here.
Each row is quantity × emission factor. Factors are Ireland-first (SEAI) with UK Government (DEFRA) factors where Ireland publishes none. The full table is below. For example, a dropped electricity bill uses the SEAI Irish grid average of 0.2241 kgCO₂ per kWh.
Only after you approve the review table are records written. Each saved record stores the factor value and source it was computed with, so updating the factor table later never silently rewrites your history.
Categories and GHG Protocol scopes
The drop zones use plain-English names; each maps to a GHG Protocol scope and category behind the scenes.
| Drop zone | GHG Protocol mapping | Covers |
|---|---|---|
| Electricity | Scope 2, Purchased electricity (location-based) | Electricity bills or annual statements: floodlights, clubhouse, gym |
| Gas & Heating | Scope 1, Stationary combustion | Natural gas bills, heating oil or LPG deliveries for the clubhouse |
| Vehicles & Equipment Fuel | Scope 1, Mobile combustion | Fuel receipts for mowers, tractors, club vans and minibuses |
| Refrigerants & Cooling | Scope 1, Fugitive emissions | F-gas service invoices: bar coolers, cold rooms, AC recharges |
| Water | Scope 3, Cat. 1, Water supply & treatment | Water utility bills, pitches, showers, clubhouse |
| Waste | Scope 3, Cat. 5, Waste generated in operations | Waste collection invoices: general, recycling, food waste |
| Team Travel | Scope 3, Cat. 6, Business travel (away fixtures) | Coach hire invoices or mileage logs for away games |
Emission factors reference
Every calculation in the app is quantity × one of these factors. Ireland-first (SEAI); UK Government (DEFRA/DESNZ) where Ireland publishes none. Factors marked "indicative" should be verified against the published tables before external reporting. Saved records keep the factor they were computed with, so this table can be updated without rewriting history.
| Source | Factor | Unit | Reference |
|---|---|---|---|
| Grid electricity (Ireland) | 0.2241 | kgCO₂e / kWh | SEAI 2026, Irish grid average |
| Natural gas | 0.1835 | kgCO₂e / kWh | SEAI 2026, gross calorific value (as billed) |
| Heating oil / kerosene | 2.5404 | kgCO₂e / litres | DEFRA 2026, burning oil (indicative, verify) |
| LPG | 1.5557 | kgCO₂e / litres | DEFRA 2026, LPG (indicative, verify) |
| Diesel (avg biofuel blend) | 2.5835 | kgCO₂e / litres | DEFRA 2026 |
| Petrol (avg biofuel blend) | 2.075 | kgCO₂e / litres | DEFRA 2026 |
| Refrigerant R404A (commercial fridges/cold rooms) | 3943 | kgCO₂e / kg | DEFRA, GWP100 AR5 (indicative, verify) |
| Refrigerant R134a (bottle coolers, vans) | 1300 | kgCO₂e / kg | DEFRA, GWP100 AR5 (indicative, verify) |
| Refrigerant R410A (air conditioning) | 1924 | kgCO₂e / kg | DEFRA, GWP100 AR5 (indicative, verify) |
| Refrigerant R32 (newer air conditioning) | 677 | kgCO₂e / kg | DEFRA, GWP100 AR5 (indicative, verify) |
| Water supply + treatment | 0.3622 | kgCO₂e / m3 | DEFRA 2026, supply 0.1913 + treatment 0.1709 kgCO2e/m3 |
| General waste to landfill | 497.29 | kgCO₂e / tonnes | DEFRA 2026, mixed municipal to landfill |
| Mixed recycling | 4.65 | kgCO₂e / tonnes | DEFRA 2026, mixed recycling (closed-loop) |
| Food waste | 700.33 | kgCO₂e / tonnes | DEFRA 2026, food waste to landfill |
| Car travel (average car) | 0.1731 | kgCO₂e / km | DEFRA 2026, average medium car |
| Coach travel | 0.0272 | kgCO₂e / passenger-km | DEFRA, coach (indicative, verify) |
Making the numbers relatable
The dashboard translates tonnes of CO₂e into everyday comparisons: trees, flights and households. These are deliberately rough, order-of-magnitude aids for committee meetings, not reporting figures. The assumptions behind them are documented here and adjustable in one place (lib/equivalencies.ts):
| Comparison | Assumption | Basis |
|---|---|---|
| 🌳 Trees | 25 | kgCO₂e absorbed by one mature tree per year · Commonly used forestry planning estimate (indicative, varies by species, age and site; see Teagasc forestry carbon guidance) |
| ✈️ Flying | 0.15 | kgCO₂e per passenger-km, short-haul economy flight · DEFRA business travel (air), average economy passenger, excluding radiative forcing (indicative) |
| 🏠 Households | 6,000 | kgCO₂e per average Irish household per year · Indicative estimate based on SEAI/CSO residential energy statistics (home energy use; excludes household transport) |
Data quality, in plain terms
- Estimated readings. Bills based on estimated (E) meter reads, and any figures we pro-rated across months, are flagged. The dashboard and report show what share of your total rests on estimates.
- Pro-rating. A bill covering 12 Nov to 9 Jan is split across November, December and January by the number of days in each.
- Gaps. Missing months are never invented. The report states how many of the 12 months have data.
- Scope 3 exclusions.The GHG Protocol's full Scope 3 list includes categories that don't apply to a sports club. The report names them and states they were screened out:
- Cat. 2 Capital goods (immaterial for most clubs, include ad hoc if a major build occurs)
- Cat. 3 Fuel- and energy-related activities (may be added later as an uplift on energy)
- Cat. 4 & 9 Upstream/downstream transportation and distribution
- …and the rest, listed in full on every report.
Ready to try it?
Grab a fictitious invoice from the samples page and drop it into a category. You'll see the whole pipeline run in about twenty seconds.
Get sample invoices