Introducing the Carbon Portfolio Manager (CPM)
3 min. read
Last updated Mar 3, 2025
Introduction
Carbon credits are an essential tool in climate strategies and play an expanding role in global climate initiatives. A recent Carbon Direct report, created in partnership with Wakefield Research, shows that 38% of companies surveyed across financial and professional services have purchased carbon credits.
However, managing carbon credits presents complex challenges—especially for buyers with diverse portfolios that balance ex-ante and ex-post credits to meet their climate targets. Companies must coordinate with multiple carbon removal suppliers, track diverse project and delivery milestones, and navigate non-standardized contracts. Many still rely on outdated tools and processes and those lead to inefficiencies that hinder their progress towards climate goals.
Such challenges create administrative burdens and can jeopardize climate objectives for organizations with multi-year offtake plans and involving multiple credit suppliers. Organizations just starting their carbon procurement journey can get ahead of these challenges by establishing systems early, setting themselves up for success as portfolio and procurement complexity grows.
Carbon Direct’s Carbon Portfolio Manager (CPM) streamlines enterprise carbon management. By centralizing critical data, automating workflows, and providing robust tracking and reporting capabilities, the CPM empowers your organization to efficiently manage carbon credit investments and meet your net-zero goals.
Challenges in carbon credit management
Tracking major milestones
Companies must track contract details, delivery timelines, and payment schedules to manage key milestones and ensure effective portfolio performance.
Carbon Direct’s 2024 State of the Voluntary Carbon Market report shows that companies contracted 40 times more high-durability tonnes through forward offtake than they retired. Ex-ante credits require careful handling due to their complex delivery schedules, project development milestones, and payment terms.
Without an efficient system to track key dates and terms, such as contract milestones, registry issuances, and retirements, your company risks missed deadlines, overpayments, and poor visibility for climate targets. Managing these milestones manually creates a significant operational burden, hindering effective reporting, and impacting sustainability and financial operations.
Managing risks
Delays or unseen challenges in project development jeopardize the timely delivery of credits and put climate targets at risk. Enterprises with specific delivery goals need visibility into potential shortfalls, delayed credits, and underperformance from suppliers to respond effectively.
For many ex-ante credits, ongoing project development introduces risks, including delays resulting from project selection, technical build-out, project financing, or permitting hurdles. These delays can push back issuance timelines and disrupt payment schedules. Organizations must have clear, organized tracking of these milestones to ensure they are aware of these delays and address risks as soon as they arise.
Coordinating with suppliers and tracking projects
As portfolios grow and diversify, managing supplier relationships and project diligence becomes increasingly complex. Assessing project quality often involves multi-step processes that can vary widely based on geography, supplier capabilities, and project type. These quality assessments often include multiple conversations with suppliers and several rounds of document intake and analysis. Tracking these technical quality assessments requires careful attention to meet your company’s carbon credit quality standards. Without a centralized system to track these details, enterprises evaluating projects in procurement decisions risk being ill-informed about supplier bottlenecks, delayed timelines, and oversight gaps.
Administrative and operational inefficiencies
Many enterprises rely on tools such as spreadsheets and email threads to manage portfolios, which become inefficient and error-prone as portfolios and personnel numbers expand. A lack of streamlined data makes it difficult to track decision history, reducing transparency and accountability across stakeholders. This fragmentation limits visibility into portfolio performance, slows decision-making, and delays critical tasks like sustainability reporting and payment reconciliation.
Carbon Direct’s Carbon Portfolio Manager (CPM)
To address these challenges, Carbon Direct created the Carbon Portfolio Manager, a platform tool designed to simplify the complexities of carbon credit management. The CPM centralizes carbon credit contracts, supplier details, and project data into one unified interface, streamlining how enterprises manage their carbon portfolios.
Top five features of the Carbon Portfolio Manager
1. Digitized contracts, projects, and supplier tracking
The CPM provides complete visibility into carbon credit procurement, enabling users to manage contracts, projects, and suppliers seamlessly.
Contracts are tracked from negotiation through closure, including financials, delivery milestones, and payment schedules. Standardized inputs developed by experts support consistent and efficient data entry.
Projects are tracked with detailed insights into type, location, diligence reports, and milestones. This feeds into an advanced dashboard for portfolio analysis.
Suppliers, and their relationships across projects and contracts, are organized with centralized communication tools, contact management, and document storage.
The CPM tracks credit registry and retirement details to accurately record every tonne purchased.
2. Advanced portfolio insights and reporting
The CPM offers an intuitive, data-driven view of your portfolio’s status and performance. Interactive dashboards provide comprehensive oversight of contract milestones, while a timeline view highlights delivery schedules and payments. With powerful data visualizations, businesses can analyze portfolio composition by project type, geography, and delivery timelines.
3. Risk assessment and tracking
To help enterprises meet their carbon procurement goals, the CPM supports users in identifying and tracking potential project and credit risks by ensuring all communication, documentation, and milestones related to a project are tracked in one place. Users can slice and filter data to uncover specific insights, analyze performance discrepancies, and track credit deliveries against short- and long-term targets. These tools help you manage risks proactively, keeping procurement goals on course.
4. Reporting support and organization
Relevant documentation is digitized and centralized within the CPM; contracts, correspondence, diligence reports, and retirement records maintain a robust audit trail. Customizable notes and decision logs align stakeholders and ensure all documentation and communication related to procurement decisions are tracked in one place, supporting compliance and audit processes.
5. Customized views and access
The CPM is designed to adapt to the diverse needs of your business. It provides configurable access levels for role-specific permissions, customizable and searchable data views, and downloadable reports. CPM securely stores and protects your carbon procurement data. For companies with extensive contracts, an onboarding service simplifies initial data entry and setup.
Key benefits of implementing the Carbon Portfolio Manager
Operational efficiency: The CPM reduces the reliance on manual processes, allowing enterprises to focus on strategic initiatives. Centralizing data and automating workflows improves team collaboration and alignment, and streamlines day-to-day operations.
Informed decision-making: Advanced data visualization and actionable insights enable precise portfolio adjustments and optimization. By aligning procurement strategies with climate goals, the CPM helps businesses maintain their sustainability trajectory.
Enhanced visibility and collaboration: With a comprehensive view of portfolio performance, the CPM helps stakeholders remain informed and aligned. Its transparent design supports collaborative decision-making and improves communication across teams, from sustainability leads to finance and executive leadership.
The Carbon Portfolio Manager provides a streamlined solution to enhance efficiency and reduce administrative burden. As the voluntary carbon market evolves, the CPM empowers enterprises to achieve climate goals with confidence.
Ready to transform your carbon management process?
Schedule a demo with our experts today to see how the CPM can support your organization’s sustainability journey.
