When your employees commute to work or travel for business, each trip has a carbon footprint that depends on how they travel — by car, train, plane, bus, and so on. To calculate these emissions, each travel mode used by your employees needs to be linked to an impact dataset that contains the environmental data for that type of transport.

This linking step is what we call travel mode matching.

When you upload employee travel data (commuting or business travel), Root automatically creates a travel mode for each unique mode name found in your data (e.g. "Car," "Train," "Flight"). These travel modes are custom to your company.

Each travel mode starts out unmatched. Your job is to link it to the right reference dataset from Root's library of travel impact data.

Upload your commuting or business travel data via CSV or Excel. Root creates travel mode records for each unique mode name in your file.

Go to the Travel Modes section under Employees. You'll see a list of all travel modes with their current status:

For each unmatched travel mode, open the reference options. You'll see a structured, hierarchical list of available datasets. For example:

Car

> Diesel

> Small

> Medium

> Large

> Petrol

> Small

> Medium

> Large

> Electric

> Battery electric

Train

> Long distance

> Regional

Plane

(assigned automatically by distance — see below)

Select the option that best matches how your employees travel. Each option shows its environmental impact per kilometer so you can verify you're picking the right one.

Once a reference is assigned, the travel mode is complete. Root multiplies the dataset's impact per kilometer by the distance of each trip to calculate the total emissions.

Plane travel has a special behavior. When you assign the "Plane" reference, Root automatically selects the right sub-dataset based on the distance of each individual trip:

This happens automatically for each trip. You don't need to create separate travel modes for different flight distances.

For each employee trip:

Impact = dataset impact per kilometer x trip distance

Root selects the dataset based on the travel mode's reference and geography. It prefers global (GLO) datasets first, then falls back to rest-of-world (RoW) datasets.

The owned/leased flag on each trip also matters — if an employee uses a company-owned vehicle, Root uses the "owned" version of the dataset, which may have different emission factors.

Both commuting and business travel use the same set of travel modes. The difference is only in what data is recorded:

Commuting — Records the employee's country, daily commute distance, and year.

Business travel — Records the specific departure, arrival, distance, and date for each trip.

Both types are calculated the same way: impact per kilometer multiplied by distance.

The emissions from employee travel are automatically allocated to the correct GHG scope based on two factors — the type of travel and whether the vehicle is company-owned:

A travel mode can only be deleted if no employee travel records reference it. If it is in use, you'll need to remove those records first.