Categorising your financial transactions helps identify activities that may produce greenhouse gas emissions. Sage Earth Carbon Accounting uses information from the transactions in your purchase ledger to estimate emissions based on the amount spent.

We’ve created a comprehensive set of business activity categories to apply to your transactions. These categories indicate the type of emissions generated and allow us to estimate each transaction’s impact.

When your accounting platform syncs with Sage Earth, our AI model automatically scans and categorises your transactions to estimate your carbon footprint and provide emissions insights. The AI model suggests a category for each transaction; manually reviewing and adjusting these categories helps improve accuracy of your footprint and future suggestions.

The AI model learns from categorisation across all users, so over time this process becomes faster. New transactions sync daily, so it’s a good idea to set aside regular time to check and categorise them. If AI cannot confidently categorise a transaction, it will be marked ‘Categorisation required’. These transactions are represented in your footprint, buy may not be an accurate representation if the category is incorrect.

Transactions categorised by AI appear in the ‘To Review’ section. If a more specific category is available, you’ll see ‘Categorisation available’, which you can refine manually. If the correct categorisation has been applied, you can confirm these transactions. They’ll then be moved to the Confirmed section.

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Your financial transactions are sorted into three tabs:

This tab shows new transactions that are uncategorised or partially categorised.

Click View details next to a transaction to open the Transaction details panel, which displays:

This tab contains transactions categorised by AI.

This tab lists all transactions where categorisation has been confirmed. Once you confirm a categorised transaction, it moves here. You can still amend the category if it's incorrect.

Bulk categorisation allow you to apply the same category to multiple transactions or confirm AI suggested categories all at once. To use it, select the checkboxes next to the transactions you want to update and choose “Edit Categories”. In the “To Review” section, you can confirm AI applied categories by selecting the relevant transactions and clicking “Confirm Categories”. You can take bulk action against up to 50 transactions at once.

Sage Earth Carbon Accounting includes general “unknown” categories, like “Unknown vehicle fuel”, for cases where specific details aren’t available. These can be used when you're unsure how to categorise a transaction more precisely.

Choosing an unknown category applies a less specific categorisation without specifying finer details. For example, under Vehicles > Diesel, you can select:

The first two options offer precise categorisation. Selecting Unknown Diesel applies a general diesel category without identifying the specific type, which will reduce the accuracy of your carbon footprint.

When applying an unknown category to a transaction, you may see a message indicating that more detailed categorisation is available. These transactions will remain in the “To Categorise” tab until a more specific category is selected.

When your accounting platform is connected and spend data is available, it is automatically linked with matching usage data to prevent double-counting. As usage data is of a higher quality than spend data, the spend is overridden by usage.

This link is based on exact category matches. For example, if a fuel transaction is categorised as Diesel > Diesel (average biofuel blend), the usage data entered in modules should use the same category. This ensures both spend and usage are counted as a single business activity

Find out more: Categories available in the Sage Earth Carbon Accounting taxonomy