Carbontrace: Carbon Numbers With a Provenance Badge

“Verified” is a word with a price. A sustainability report saying a figure was confirmed by a carbon platform is a different document from one saying the figure was estimated from reference factors, and the difference matters most to the person who signs it. So ReVend does not blur the two. Each period on the ESG report says which of them you are actually holding.

The internal snapshot stays

The ESG report keeps doing what it did: generating internal snapshots from your own ReVend data, using the published emission factors. Carbontrace does not replace that layer, it adds provenance on top of it — so a period that has been through the carbon engine can say so, and a period that has not, cannot.

Your key, your account

The integration settings at /settings/integrations/carbontrace store your tenant’s own Carbontrace API key. There is no shared platform key; the calculations run against your account, on your terms. The page shows whether the package is included in your entitlement, and carries one tenant-wide switch to turn automatic calculations off — useful in the week your team is reconciling something and would prefer nothing moved underneath them.

What runs on its own

For a tenant that is entitled to the package, has not switched the integration off and has a key linked, carbon calculations run automatically: a preliminary calculation when a device is created, and an enriched recalculation after a Blancco import brings in the erasure detail. Nobody presses anything. The preliminary figure exists so no device sits carbon-less in the meantime; the recalculation exists because a device with a verified wipe record is simply a better-described device.

Import without an API

The import at /general/imports/carbontrace is a real import, not a placeholder. Upload the Carbontrace results file, read the preview showing which rows matched your assets and which did not, then apply. It is the route for corrections, for bulk backfills, and for teams who would rather move results as a file than as an API call.

The badge, per period

On the ESG report every period shows its verification status: internal estimate, in progress, Carbontrace-confirmed, failed, or imported — plus a “preliminary” marker while the period still rests on provisional calculations. A per-period sync button sits alongside, and it appears only when the integration is genuinely usable: entitled, switched on, key linked, and the period not already in flight. A button that cannot work is worse than no button at all.

No test-connection button

There is deliberately no “test connection” control, because Carbontrace offers no key or status endpoint to test against. Such a button would check nothing and report success on faith, which is the most expensive kind of green tick. The same rule runs down the rest of the page: the accounting connectors show a “Planned” card naming the manual route that works today, with no key fields and nothing to save. A page that looks empty is honest. A complete-looking form that stores nothing is a support ticket with a two-week fuse.