Quick Estimate

Quick Estimate gives you a fast, spend-based snapshot of your carbon emissions using your financial transactions.

It can be a great place to start, but it’s not the full picture.

Quick Estimate helps you understand where your emissions might be coming from and which areas may need deeper attention. Because it relies on a limited data set — primarily your general ledger and a few operational inputs — it doesn’t capture everything. That means it’s not suitable for official reporting, audits, or confident decision-making on its own.

Think of it as your entry point — a simple and accessible way to get going before diving into a full GHG assessment.

How to Use Quick Estimate

1. Navigate to Quick Estimate from the home screen or main menu.

2. Import your transaction data

3. Select your currency.

4. Input your fuel usage or average fuel price, and your electricity consumption or average electricity price.

5. Let Sumday review and categorise your transactions.

6. Review the estimated emissions breakdown by category and scope.

7. Use Sumd[AI] to ask questions and explore further.

You can reset and re-run a Quick Estimate as many times as you like. This can be useful if you want to see how changing your Scope 1 or 2 estimates (fuel or electricity use) affects the overall results, or if you want to try uploading a revised version of your transactions file.

How Quick Estimate Works

Quick Estimate maps your transaction data to relevant emissions sources using region-specific, spend-based emissions factors. It covers Scopes 1, 2 and 3.

What emission factors are included?

The following emission factors are used to multiply your inputs to calculate emissions:

Scope 1 – Fuel Use

• Quick Estimate assumes all fuel entered is diesel
• If you provide litres consumed, emissions are calculated using most relevant regional emissions factors

Scope 2 – Electricity Use

• Electricity-related expenses are identified in your transactions.
• If you provide kWh, we’ll use that to calculate emissions.

Scope 3 – Other Purchased Goods and Services

• Quick Estimate uses transaction metadata — such as account names, supplier names, and descriptions — to assign emissions sources and identify the likely Scope 3 category.

• Note: Because this process is automated, the assigned emission sources may sometimes differ from what you expect or from the results of a completed assessment, where you have direct control over selecting the exact emissions source for each transaction.

Data-Dependent Behaviour

Quick Estimate uses a best-fit approach to apply region-specific spend-based emission factors to your transaction data. Because it works with a limited data set, results can sometimes vary based on how your data is presented.

• If a transaction doesn’t clearly match an emission source, the tool may occasionally assign an unexpected emissions source.

• This can sometimes result in surprising categories appearing even if they weren’t in your transactions.

This behaviour doesn’t mean your data is incorrect — it reflects how the system interprets account names or transaction descriptions it isn't sure about.

Quick Estimate is designed to give fast, directional insights rather than precise results. The tool is continually being refined, and feedback from users helps improve how it interprets different data types over time.

Tips for adjusting Quick Estimate results

If you get results that don’t seem reasonable, you could review the transactions import file to identify any unclear account names or descriptions. Adjusting these to be clearer can help Quick Estimate assign more appropriate emission sources.

Note: You can only review or edit the transaction data if you uploaded it as a manual file. If you imported directly from Xero, you won’t be able to open or adjust the imported data inside Sumday — but you can do a manual export from Xero, review or tidy the transaction descriptions, and then upload that file manually. See: How to export transactions from Xero for Sumday.

Because Quick Estimate can be re-run as many times as you like, you can test different versions of your transactions file until you get results that feel more aligned with your expectations.

If the results still seem don’t feel relevant to your expectations or data, it may be best to continue with a carbon assessment to have more control and overview of the emission sources applied to each transaction. If you're getting particularly interesting results in a Quick Estimate, feel free to share it with our Support team so we can understand how the tool is interpreting different data and improve its accuracy in future versions.

Quick Estimate vs. a Full GHG Inventory Assessment

In Summary

Quick Estimate is a fast and accessible way to get started, giving you early insights into your emissions profile from your financial data. Because it’s designed for speed and simplicity, results may vary depending on the imported data  — but the tool is continually improving as we refine how it interprets different transaction and account names using feedback from users like you.

If you’re preparing for reporting, external assurance, or detailed decision-making, you’ll need to complete a full assessment. Sumday helps you go from quick insights to full carbon accounting when you're ready.