When your company purchases goods and services — such as office supplies, IT equipment, cleaning services, or consulting — these purchases have an environmental footprint. To calculate that footprint, each item in Root needs to be linked to an impact dataset that contains the environmental data for that type of good or service.

This linking step is what we call Goods & Services matching. Once matched, Root can calculate the carbon footprint and other environmental indicators for everything your facilities consume.

Goods & Services items exist at two levels:

Company level — You define a good or service once (e.g. "IT Equipment" or "Cleaning Services"). This is where the impact dataset is assigned.

Facility level — You can also define the good or services per facility. Each facility then records how much of that good or service it uses, with a specific quantity and unit, over a given time period.

This means you only need to match each item to a dataset once, and every facility that uses it benefits from the same match.

Goods & Services items are created either through a data upload (CSV/Excel) or manually in the platform. Each item has a name and is initially unmatched.

Go to the Goods & Services section. You'll see a list of all your items with their current status:

For each unmatched item, you have two matching options:

Activity-based matching — Search for and select an impact dataset from Root's standard database (EcoInvent). The dataset defines the environmental impact per physical unit (e.g. per kilogram, per hour) of that good or service. Use this when you know the specific type and quantity of what was purchased.

Expenditure-based matching — Alternatively, you can match to an expenditure-based impact factor from the Exiobase database. These datasets define the environmental impact per monetary unit (e.g. per euro spent) for a given economic sector. Use this when you only have spending data rather than physical quantities.

This is the only place in Root where expenditure-based matching with Exiobase is available.

If the unit you use at your facilities (e.g. "hours" or "liters") differs from the dataset's unit (e.g. "kg"), you'll need to provide a conversion factor.

Common conversions (like grams to kilograms) are handled automatically. You only

need to provide a factor when Root can't convert between the units on its own.

When recording facility usage, you can specify whether the data is actual or estimated:

Once an item is matched and unit conversions are set, Root calculates the impact as:

Impact = dataset impact per unit x quantity consumed x conversion factor

The impact is distributed evenly across the months covered by the utility contract period. For example, if a contract runs from January to December and specifies 1,200 kg of paper, Root allocates 100 kg per month.

A Goods & Services item can only be deleted if it is not currently used at any facility. If it is in use, you'll need to remove the facility references first.