At Bend, we are always looking for innovations in the space of financial automation, normalization, and enrichment. For the past year, we've used Codat to automate data collection from our customers, internally leveraging their universal category schema to guarantee 100% coverage of spend-based CO2e estimates. Today we're excited to announce that we've added Codat's standard chart of accounts to our public facing API.
Previously, we only supported merchant category codes (MCC) and third-party audited intensity factors for matched businesses. But while MCC is a more granular category schema, it's often not available — not all business purchases take place on corporate cards, where MCCs are widely used. And at the accounting level, every company has their own set of categories for organizing spend. Codat normalizes these categories, regardless of industry or ERP.
Now, any Codat partner can leverage the Bend API to surface Scope 3 carbon accounting alongside their customers' financial data. Bend will do what Bend does best, providing the most accurate sustainability assessment for any transaction based on the data provided, using either a merchant-specific intensity or a category-based factor for each line item according to its GL.
How does this work? Behind the scenes, Codat automatically sorts customer GL codes into its standard chart of accounts. These account mappings are available via its Enhanced Profit and Loss API. Any emissions-relevant spend tracked by Codat can thus be assigned a standard Codat category. The transaction with categorized line items can then be submitted to Bend's enrich/transaction endpoint for its sustainability assessment.
Ready to try it out? The Enrichment API includes a generous free tier of 100 API calls / month. You can request a trial key at bend.green/trial-key.
We believe that embedding climate analytics into the financial tools we use every day is an inevitable evolution of corporate impact measurement.
Thanks—we can't wait to see what you build!
Thomas, CTO at Bend
