What fields does a Partnership for Carbon Transparency (PACT) product footprint exchange contain?

PACT's high-level summary lists these main groups of fields: product and company details, footprint details such as time, geography, boundary and declared unit, two footprint figures, carbon attributes, items reported separately, standards used, data quality, and verification. It is not the full field list; that is in PACT's Technical Specifications.

The summary PACT gives

• Product information: name, description, product identifiers and classification codes, plus company name and identifier.
• Time: reference period, validity period, created and updated dates, and others.
• Geography, and a description of the boundary processes.
• Declared unit and the number of those units in the product the footprint refers to. A declared unit is the measure the figure is per, such as one kilogram.
• Product footprint in kilograms (kg) of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e) per declared unit, cradle-to-gate, both excluding and including biogenic carbon dioxide (CO2) uptake.
• Carbon attributes: fossil, biogenic and recycled carbon content, and others.
• Detail: fossil emissions, biogenic non-CO2 emissions and land use change emissions.
• Reported separately: packaging, outbound logistics, and carbon capture and use or storage data, and others.
• Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) characterisation factors, meaning the warming values for each gas, the standards used, key method choices such as the exemption percentage and allocation rules, and secondary factor sources.
• Data integrity: primary data share and the three data quality ratings.
• Verification information.

Where the full list lives

The summary points to the PACT Technical Specifications 3.0 and the PACT Simplified Data Model 3.0 for every field and definition.

Spreadsheet or software

PACT says spreadsheets are currently the most common way to exchange footprints, but they are hard to scale and to keep confidential. It recommends companies use software solutions for a standard format. PACT adds that many solution providers also help with the calculation.

Fields your bills help with

Energy bills and fuel invoices give the quantities behind the footprint figure. Our reading: the declared unit, standards used and the exemption and allocation choices are decisions you record; the reference period is set by the dates of your bills.

What Senseible does here

Senseible reads fuel invoices and electricity bills into monthly records, the quantities behind the footprint figure. Senseible builds figures in the PACT exchange format as a custom integration, on request.

• What to send when a buyer asks for a product footprint
• What PACT is and who needs it
• Primary data share
• Two PACT figures with and without uptake

Sources: PACT Methodology Version 3.0, World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD), WBCSD page for PACT Methodology Version 3

Last reviewed 2026-11-07. Summary is from PACT Methodology 3.0, section 6.1.1. Field names change between versions, so check the Technical Specifications your buyer names.