'As Intuit's Rupesh Shah, Director, Corporate Sustainability explains: "Snapshot reads your Quickbook data, pulls every dollar the business has spent over the past twelve months, and works with Cooler's economic input-output matching engine. It looks at the payee and the vendor of every transaction and tries to match it to the closest of about 1,000 carbon categories that the Cooler engine has. And for each of those carbon categories there's a carbon intensity -- emissions per dollar spent." The result is a report detailing a company's carbon footprint and cost-effective opportunities to reduce it.
Shah continues : "I was struck when I was interviewing small businesses, how many of them were trying to get their customers to see that they're doing something green. But there's no real authentic way to message that." Shah believes Intuit can play a role in providing "a little bit more transparency and legitimacy for those claims around green."' (from Intuit Helps Small business Capture a 'Green Snapshot' by Joel Makower content courtesy of GreenBiz.com)
I can't wait till this rolls out for indivduals. Kudos to Intuit and Snapshot.
--till next week Restore, Refresh, Recycle & Renew.
4 comments:
I agree, this is an amazing technological advancement that will really give us a jump start to really being green. So many people want to be green but don't know where to start or what they could do in order to make there footprint smaller. With this program people would be able to see what they are doing wrong and change it. And with a whole company using this program I wouldn't be surprised if employees took home what they learned at work. And if they do that then it would cause a spread/movement to living a greener lifestyle. All in all this is an amazing program and I wish they did make a program to be used at home.
I also agree that this product is a great start to helping smaller businesses and hopefully individuals realize where their carbon footprint is most destructive and also inform customers what areas they are currently green in and which they are working towards. What I believe is a great selling point is that it comes from Intuit and their products are already widely recognized and trusted by businesses and individuals. Both Turbo Tax and Quickbooks are products used by small businesses and have been used for years. This gives consumers a sense of trust and comfort, and existing Intuit customers will mostly likely have a sense of how to work the product. Many companies desire and strive to be greener but are overwhelmed by having to change many aspects of their business and lack a sense of direction when it comes to where to begin. This program eliminates many of these stresses and seems like a relatively simple program to use and understand. If this can be used on an individual level I would definitely use it.
I think the technology's greatest benefit is that it provides businesses a way to prove that they are in fact doing something eco-friendly. With all of the greenwashing out there, there are a lot of ways to make customers think that you are making an effort to be green when it may actually be false. This program would show factual numbers which, as long as the data entered is correct, would give a clear picture of what the company is actually doing. This way, the consumer can be confident that their money is going to a green cause.
I think this is a great idea, especially for all the companies that claim they are helping the environemnt by doing ...this that and the other. Now we will have the oppurtunity to see what it is companies are actually doing and not only whether or not they are actually doing it but exactly what change or impact it has on the environment once they do it. i feel its one thing to "attempt to make a change" but "actually making a change is what counts at the end of the day. I think this idea should be implemented for every business in order to track spending their and their carbon foot prints.
Post a Comment