From ESG Project to Finance ERP
Ryan Miller, VP & GM of Private Markets at Persefoni, on building an ERP for carbon
The key shift is that carbon accounting stops being a small sustainability project once it becomes a finance controlled reporting system. When it sat inside ESG teams, the work was often annual, manual, and consultant heavy, which made budgets easy to cut. As disclosure rules and lending, procurement, and investor scrutiny moved closer to core financial reporting, ownership started moving toward the CFO, where systems, controls, and recurring budget already exist.
-
The old workflow looked like a consulting exercise, teams pulled fuel, electricity, travel, supply chain, and facilities data from across the business, then consultants mapped each input to emissions factors in spreadsheets. That structure naturally lived in small sustainability teams and was expensive enough to limit adoption beyond large enterprises.
-
Persefoni framed the wedge as finance software, not a broad ESG dashboard. The product is built around repeatable closes, auditability, and disclosure workflows, with the CFO involved because much of the needed operating data already rolls up through finance systems. That is why the company compares the category to ERP and accounting software more than to brand oriented sustainability tools.
-
The market around carbon accounting is splitting into specialized layers. Watershed positions itself as an enterprise sustainability platform with finance offerings, while Patch handles the offsets and removals workflow that comes after footprint measurement. That separation matters because once budgets move into finance, buyers want clear controls over accounting, reporting, and any later credit purchases.
This category is heading toward the same budget line as financial close and compliance software. As more disclosures are pulled into formal filings and assurance processes, carbon systems will be bought less like optional ESG tooling and more like core reporting infrastructure, with larger software budgets, deeper ERP integration, and tighter CFO oversight.