For the fourth consecutive year, Webexpenses has achieved carbon-neutral certification for 2025. But here’s the thing about sustainability credentials: They’re only meaningful if they drive real change beyond your own organisation. By now, we’ve all had our fill of greenwashing.
That’s exactly what we’ve built our Carbon Footprint Tracking feature to do: Help you understand, measure, and actively reduce your environmental impact through smarter expense management.
What does ‘carbon neutral’ actually mean?
Before we dive in, it’s worth explaining what ‘carbon neutral’ actually means. It’s one of those pervasive phrases that gets used in the press, but it’s rarely explained properly.
Carbon neutrality means balancing the amount of greenhouse gases your business produces with an equivalent amount removed from the atmosphere. The process involves a rigorous and transparent framework to deliver carbon neutrality, typically following recognised protocols that require businesses to measure their emissions, implement reduction strategies, and offset any remaining emissions through verified environmental projects.
For Webexpenses, this meant expanding our renewable energy adoption across offices, growing our electric vehicle fleet, and partnering with Carbon Neutral Britain to offset 198.44 tonnes of CO2 through reforestation and renewable energy projects spanning from Nicaragua to China. But achieving carbon neutrality as a company is just the beginning of the conversation.
The more pressing question is: How can we help our customers do the same?
The carbon cost of business travel
Your carbon footprint represents the total greenhouse gas emissions released as a result of your business activities and energy consumption. While the global average sits at 4 tonnes per person annually, experts recommend reducing this to under 2 tonnes by 2050 to meaningfully – combat climate change.
Your carbon footprint measures all the greenhouse gases your business produces through activities like travel, energy use, and operations. For many companies in the 50–400 employee range, carbon tracking often feels like a tedious “admin job” with little immediate payoff. Quarterly spreadsheets or annual sustainability reports can seem like a lot of effort for something that feels abstract.
But there’s a real, tangible benefit to getting it right. For companies with significant travel requirements, business trips are often their largest controllable source of emissions. Making smarter choices here saves money, reduces your environmental impact, and enhances your reputation.
The key is to make carbon impact visible at the point of decision-making, so employees can see the environmental consequences of flights, car trips, or train journeys while planning them – not months later when the numbers land in a report.
Turning expense management into environmental accountability
If your carbon emissions are not being tracked, they’re not being managed. This insight sits at the heart of why we’ve integrated carbon tracking directly into expense management workflows rather than treating it as a separate sustainability initiative.
Think about the last time someone in your organisation booked a business trip. They likely considered cost, convenience, and time – but did they have visibility into the environmental impact of choosing a flight over a train, or driving versus public transport? Probably not, because that information typically – arrives far too late.
Our Carbon Footprint Tracking feature changes this dynamic by calculating emissions in real-time as expense claims are submitted. When employees log mileage for a car journey, train travel, or flight expenses, they immediately see the CO₂ impact of their choice. This isn’t about guilt or restriction – it’s about informed decision-making.
The system accounts for different vehicle types, transportation modes, and journey distances, using established government conversion factors to provide accurate emissions data.
These conversion factors are continually updated by the government, and we update our software to match. More importantly, this information flows directly into reporting dashboards that finance teams can use to identify patterns, set reduction targets, and measure progress over time.
Creating a culture of environmental awareness
What makes carbon tracking effective isn’t just the measurement – it’s the behaviour change that follows. When employees can see the environmental cost of their travel choices in the same interface where they submit expenses, it naturally becomes part of their decision-making process.
Consider a typical scenario: a regional manager needs to visit three customer sites across the country. With traditional expense systems, they might default to flying between cities because it seems most efficient. But when they can immediately see that taking the train for shorter journeys reduces emissions by 70% while adding only an hour to travel time, many choose the more sustainable option.
This shift happens organically when environmental impact becomes as visible as financial cost. You don’t need complex or expensive carbon accounting software or dedicated sustainability teams to get started – the data is already embedded in your expense management process.
Practical steps toward carbon neutrality with Webexpenses
For businesses serious about achieving carbon neutrality, travel emissions represent both a significant challenge and an accessible starting point. Unlike changing energy suppliers or restructuring supply chains, travel choices offer immediate opportunities for impact reduction.
The process begins with establishing a baseline. Carbon accounting software helps organisations calculate, track, and manage greenhouse gas emissions across their operations, and travel expenses provide some of the most reliable data for this calculation because they’re already being captured and categorised.
Once you understand your current emissions profile, you can set realistic reduction targets. Maybe it’s encouraging train travel for journeys under 500 miles, or implementing approval processes for international flights. The key is making these policies feel supportive rather than restrictive – which happens when people understand the environmental reasoning behind them.
Technology plays a crucial role here. When carbon impact data flows seamlessly into existing workflows rather than requiring separate reporting systems, compliance becomes effortless rather than burdensome.
Sustainable business travel is possible
There’s much cynicism towards ‘environmental awareness’ among the public and smaller businesses. Understandably so, it’s been turned into a political talking point or used as moral cover for unscrupulous behaviour.
But speaking from experience as a mid-sized business, we’ve found that sustainable practices and commercial success are not mutually exclusive – they’re complementary. –
Embedding sustainability into everyday business processes delivers practical benefits. Tracking travel emissions, for example, reveals lower-carbon options that also save money and limit regulatory or reputational risk. Customers, investors, and partners increasingly favour companies that make environmental responsibility part of routine decision-making – and doing so doesn’t have to be burdensome.
The businesses that will thrive in the next decade are those that treat environmental accountability with the same seriousness as financial accountability. The path to carbon neutrality isn’t just about offsetting emissions – it’s about systems that naturally encourage better choices.
When those systems integrate seamlessly with the tools your teams already use, sustainability becomes a natural part of how you operate. That’s how you move beyond carbon-neutral certification toward genuine environmental leadership – and how individual businesses can contribute to reducing global carbon emissions to sustainable levels by 2050.
Keen to see our Carbon Tracking first hand? Book a demo and let one of our consultants guide you through the platform.
