Sage has announced the acquisition of Bristol-based carbon accounting solution provider Spherics. Neither party disclosed the terms of the deal. The Spherics Sustainability Intelligence Platform draws information from accounting platforms such as Xero, QuickBooks, Sage Accounting and Excel. It identifies the carbon intensities associated with each transaction using the amount spent, transaction types and supplier names. It then uses operational information to turn that into the impact on each SME’s carbon footprint.
The solution also enables SMEs to add carbon emission factors to procurement categories. These can include delivery, accommodation, electricity and travel modes. The factors align with the GreenHouse Gas Protocol Corporate Accounting and Reporting Standard
Amaya Souarez, EVP Cloud Operations, Sage, commented, “We know that SMBs care about the impact they have on the environment, and our research shows that they want to work with suppliers and partners that can help them understand and address it. The acquisition of Spherics represents an important milestone in our sustainability strategy. By combining Spherics’ innovative software with Sage’s digital network, we are connecting businesses with their customer and supplier emissions data, enabling easy and collaborative climate action across value chains which helps to reduce carbon.”
George Sandilands, CEO & Co-founder of Spherics, said, “Our vision and mission align very much with Sage’s core values, and we are excited to embark on this new journey to help SMBs knock down barriers to a more sustainable future. Global emissions are still rising fast, and we need immediate and meaningful climate action across the world. Together with Sage, we can help make a global impact on greenhouse gas emissions by supporting SMBs on their journey to net zero.”
Sage, Spherics and ESG
Enterprise Times spoke to Aaron Harris, CTO of Sage, about this acquisition and several other subjects at Sage Transform this week. The rest of this interview will be published later.
When will Spherics integrate with other solutions such as Sage Active, Sage Intacct and Sage X3? Harris replied, “It is our intention to make it available for those products. We’re focused right now on the UK market because we believe there’s some regulatory compliance coming. And there are other factors creating more of a need for it. We will bring it into those products you mentioned. I just can’t give you the timeline.”
How does this acquisition fit into the Sage ESG strategy?
“We believe that CFOs, finance leaders, and accounting departments will be the teams within business that take on the work of emissions accounting and reporting. So we can see that there’s a demand coming, so we want to have an answer. It also shows a commitment to our purpose and ambition and the strategy that I’ve talked about before, to use technology to enable our customers to grow sustainably.
“The other thing that’s really interesting about it is that products like Spherics require a lot of data to build really accurate capabilities to forecast and predict. We’ve got the ability to plug Spherics into our Digital Network and allow it to learn from a much greater set of data that we can then make available in different ways than just through the Spherics standalone product. We might turn some of this into a web service for example.”
What other ESG initiatives are you looking into?
“There’s a couple of causes that we support and are pretty focused on. One of them is equality in small and medium-sized businesses that are owned by minorities and that are owned by women. One of the organisations we support in many ways, including funding a programme to issue small business loans, is the BOSS network. The boss Network is an organisation that’s totally committed to black female business owners. It provides training and other support to help them start businesses. We’ve been quite involved in providing resources and investments that can then be passed on to these female business owners.”
What about from a product point of view?
“Carbon emissions is the first and most obvious thing for us to tackle. However, a big part of products like Sage Intacct is that they’re designed in such a way that you can account for and report on lots of information beyond just your typical GAAP accounting data. Customers can, for example, define the other ESG commitments they have put those in a budget. If it’s a quantitative thing, track it in the general ledger along with all their accounting transactions and report on it in the same way.”
This is part of the extension to the Sage Planning and Budgeting solution Dan Miller shared with Enterprise Times earlier this week and was announced during the main keynote.
Enterprise Times: What does this mean
In acquiring Spherics, Sage has kickstarted its sustainability portfolio. This area is a hot topic for many businesses, unsure of how they will understand their carbon footprint, let alone reduce it. With the Sage brand and sales ecosystem behind Spherics, it should come to a much wider audience. Hopefully, Sage will waste little time in integrating the solution to Sage Intacct Manufacturing, Sage Intacct and Sage X3 as It looks to break down the barriers faced in reducing carbon emissions for its customers.
Mickey North Rizza, Group Vice President, Enterprise Software, IDC, commented, “A company’s ability to integrate sustainability metrics into its growth strategy and to demonstrate its sustainability credentials transparently is becoming a strong differentiator globally.
“We see companies moving towards more integrated, outcome-driven ways of incorporating sustainability into every step of the business life cycle, and our studies show that organisations are investing in many application areas directly related to sustainability and ESG initiatives. In particular, the applications of supply chain, finance, and ERP are at the top of this investment with some of the largest benefits of elevated productivity, increased profitability, and decreased costs.”
