Sustainability Management Software: How to Choose the Best Solution

Sustainability management software measures, tracks, oversees, and reports on your organization’s environmental impact. Some of these solutions focus on specific components of ESG management, like carbon accounting, supply chain data collection, or reporting frameworks like CSRD, TCFD, or GRI. Data capabilities, integrations, and scalability also vary widely from one tool to another.

If you aren’t sure what you need and what to look for, you risk investing in software that doesn’t align with your reporting requirements, operational context, or long-term sustainability goals.

This means that whether you’re implementing sustainability tracking for the first time or replacing an existing system, choosing the right sustainability management software is an overwhelming, complex process. In this article, we’ll walk you through the main areas that fall  under the sustainability management software umbrella, with specific notes on how they’re approached by the best solutions.

The sustainability reporting landscape

Broadly speaking, sustainability management software encompasses three main areas:

• Carbon accounting: Translating your energy data into emissions categories and calculating your total carbon impact.
• Sustainability reporting: Organizing your sustainability data into the required formats for disclosures.
• Energy management: Controlling your energy costs

Each of these areas has distinct software categories and specific capabilities that support sustainability management. Sometimes these capability areas overlap, but you don’t want to settle for an incomplete solution. You want software that checks every box.

But software solutions don’t just vary by coverage of these areas. They also vary dramatically in terms of:

• Scalability: How well they organize data from multiple locations, vendors, utilities, and countries.
• Data accuracy: How they correct or pass-on errors in your underlying sustainability data.

In this piece, we’ll walk you through the landscape and share the essential product features you need to look for in each. Once you’re familiar with the landscape you can make an informed decision about what you actually need—both today and tomorrow.

Not only do you need to be sure your sustainability management software will do what you need it to, you need to be sure it does so in a way that maximizes your ROI, is trustworthy, and will scale with your organization.

Types of sustainability management software solutions

Sustainability management software spans three main capability areas: carbon accounting, sustainability reporting, and energy management. A well-rounded solution should encompass all three. Here are the capabilities to look for in each area.

Carbon accounting software: Calculate your impact

Carbon accounting, a subset of GHG accounting, is at the core of sustainability management—it’s how you quantify your carbon emissions and translate your operations into a carbon footprint. It’s also tedious, because accuracy is critical and there are many inputs that need to be converted into CO2e (carbon dioxide equivalents).

Quality sustainability management software should automate as much of this as possible, so all you have to do is feed it the underlying information about your operations.

Scope 1, 2, and 3 emissions calculations

Whether you’re legally required to report on Scope 1, 2, and 3 emissions or you voluntarily report them for investors and consumers, your sustainability management solution should calculate and format these emissions based on globally recognized standards like the Greenhouse Gas Protocol’s Corporate Standard. Every calculation needs to be rooted in scientifically-backed equivalents, such as the EPA’s Inventory for Greenhouse Gases.

REC tracking

Your renewable energy certificates (RECs) have a key role in offsetting your carbon emissions. As you analyze the total carbon impact of your operations, your sustainability management software should track renewables for you.

Sustainability reporting software: Simplify compliance

Sustainability disclosures demonstrate your organization’s commitment to sustainability with a combination of qualitative and quantitative data. The specifics of these disclosures vary based on your industry, location, vertical, and goals, and the standards you’re subject to.

Sustainability standards, benchmarks, and frameworks are trending toward consolidation, but there are still hundreds of them in use, which can make reporting a complex and incredibly tedious process. Your organization’s operational context and competitive landscape plays an important role in shaping your sustainability reports as well.

Without sustainability management software, compliance is overwhelming. But the right reporting tool keeps the right data in one place and in the right formats, making compliance hassle-free.

Integration with sustainability reporting frameworks

Your sustainability data needs to do more than live in a spreadsheet. Depending on your operations, there may be several benchmarking and disclosure platforms you need to upload and maintain your data in. ENERGY STAR Portfolio Manager and LEED Arc, for example, use your sustainability data to score and certify your buildings. And reporting frameworks like GRESB, CDP, and TFCD require lengthy processes to reformat and present your data.

The best sustainability management software for your organization is the one that integrates with the sustainability platforms that matter to you. Automatically aggregating your data is a valuable time-saving capability, but if that database doesn’t integrate, you’re still left with a lot of manual data entry—and opportunities for error.

Tango Energy & Sustainability streamlines the sustainability reporting process by integrating directly with ENERGY STAR Portfolio Manager, LEED Arc, GRESB, CDP, TCFD, SASB, GRI, RE100, and SBTi.

Sustainability KPI monitoring

Key question: How will the software enable you to track sustainability KPIs—and can it track the ones that matter to your business?

Reviewing and analyzing your organization’s key performance indicators shouldn’t require you to comb through all your sustainability data and manually assemble them somewhere else. Whether you’re just tracking the basics like energy consumption, water usage, and emissions, or you’re following a specific standard, your sustainability management software should surface these sustainability KPIs in a configurable dashboard, so you have easy access to the high-level insights that are most important to your reports.

Data benchmarking and peer comparisons

Peer comparison is a key aspect of sustainability reporting that can inform and reflect the types of investments you prioritize as well as your broader sustainability management strategy. A growing list of cities also require this benchmarking for you to operate within them. Ideally, your sustainability management software should directly connect to benchmarking databases so that you can easily gauge and report your building performance in relation to similar operations.

Energy management software: Control your budget, avoid waste

Sustainability isn’t just about the impact of your operations. Companies and investors see sustainability as a long-term value creation opportunity, and cost optimization is a major reason why. Sustainability management includes reducing variances in energy usage caused by waste, inefficiencies, and lack of control. And the best sustainability management software will include a suite of capabilities aimed at reducing your operating costs.

Peak load management

Each of your locations is connected to an Independent System Operator’s (ISO’s) power grid. Patterns in local power demand will form regular peaks and valleys in energy consumption and strain on the ISO’s grid. Some providers (like PJM, NYISO, and ISONE) use capacity charges to apply different supply rates based on how much energy customers use during peak hours. Depending on the ISO, up to 40% of your regular rate may be based on these peak-hour contributions.

Your provider may not tell you when their peak load is. But the right sustainability management software can. Using direct integrations with your energy provider, software like Tango Energy & Sustainability can use load forecasting and analysis to estimate these peak windows, so you can plan operations around this time and secure lower rates.

Budgeting and forecasting

Budgeting for your energy needs and forecasting future demand is incredibly difficult without a centralized view of your entire portfolio’s historical consumption—and when your costs vary wildly due to anomalous usage. Sustainability management software should simplify budgeting and forecasting your energy needs simply by virtue of providing this comprehensive visibility and helping you normalize your costs, but it should also have robust built-in budgeting capabilities.

Part of managing your sustainability is tracking where your utility expenses are at in relation to the capital you’ve allocated for them. Sustainability management software like Tango Energy & Sustainability makes it easy to monitor your progress throughout the year, analyze variances, and adjust your forecasts based on changes in usage patterns.

Measurement and verification

As you look to prioritize sustainability investments like improvements to infrastructure and more efficient equipment, it’s vital that you track the success or failure of these investments and understand their true relationship to your utility costs. Measurement and Verification (M&V) is an essential sustainability management capability that shows your energy consumption before and after a change was implemented and adjusts for other factors like weather and operational differences, allowing you to accurately evaluate the impact of each investment.

The bottom line

You can rule out a good deal of the sustainability management software landscape based on what solution area they cover. Most organizations are best served by a comprehensive sustainability management solution that covers all three of these areas, instead of assembling a suite of point solutions. Tango sustainability management software is a leading example: it covers carbon accounting, sustainability reporting, and energy management in one integrated solution.

In the next section, we’ll highlight some of the main factors that differentiate sustainability software, even when they claim to provide the same solution like Scope 1, 2, and 3 reporting.

Sustainability management software differentiation

Beyond the three main capabilities of carbon accounting, sustainability reporting, and energy management, there are two factors that set the best options apart from the rest: scalability and accuracy. Can it meet your needs now and in the future? And will it help you correct the errors throughout your utility data, or simply repeat them?

Evaluating scalability: key factors to look for

The larger your portfolio, the more complicated sustainability management becomes. Tracking, overseeing, and reporting on the performance of a handful of buildings may seem doable with spreadsheets and internally-maintained tools. But when you have hundreds or thousands of locations spanning multiple states and/or countries? That spreadsheet doesn’t scale.

The best sustainability management software reduces complexity for multinational enterprises and SMBs alike—and it doesn’t become unwieldy, no matter how reporting requirements or your business reality change.

Data standardization

The challenge with multiple locations isn’t just that there’s more sustainability data to manage. It’s that there are more data sources. More billing systems. More pricing models. More data formats. Even if you took the time to manually compile your portfolio’s energy data, the lack of standardization would make it difficult to effectively use and analyze.

Automating data intake only solves part of the scalability problem. The best sustainability management software doesn’t just integrate with utility providers and aggregate your billing data—it standardizes it, so every bill contributes to a single filterable database.

Utility types

Not every sustainability management software solution tracks every type of utility. Some are specialized, and narrowly focus on energy, water, gas, sewer, or waste. This limited scope leaves you stuck filling in gaps manually or piecing together a larger system from multiple point solutions.

All of the resources your organization consumes and the waste it produces contribute to your sustainability. So a holistic sustainability management solution should let you track and manage all of these utilities in one place.

Evaluating data accuracy: key factors to look for

Data is the foundation of your sustainability reports, goals, and initiatives. Inaccurate sustainability data doesn’t just lead you astray—it can easily lead to accidental “greenwashing.” Intentional or not, making false claims about your organization’s sustainability can result in penalties, lawsuits, and loss of reputation, among other problems.

And unfortunately, sustainability data is notoriously inaccurate. A BlackRock study of major global investors found that 53% of respondents were concerned about “poor quality or availability of ESG data and analytics.” Lack of specialized sustainability management software is partially to blame. In a 2024 KPMG study, 47% of respondents said their organization still used spreadsheets to track ESG data. But utility providers themselves will often have errors in their data too. Which is why simply having a dedicated solution won’t solve the data accuracy problem. You need sustainability management software that makes your data more accurate.

Built-in data auditing

Basic sustainability management software aggregates your utility data through direct integrations with your providers. Quality solutions standardize that data. But the best ones don’t stop there—they audit your utility data for common errors like gaps in billing periods, duplicate data, incorrect taxes, and rate discrepancies.

Third-party data validation is often a requirement for compliance with sustainability disclosures. These audits are expensive, largely because of the volume of data auditors must review to ensure your data is accurate. Automated auditing can dramatically reduce the time they spend combing through your data by pre-emptively surfacing the errors that need to be corrected.

This doesn’t just simplify third-party audits though. At scale, billing errors can cost you hundreds of thousands of dollars per year.

Your best choice for sustainability management software

Sustainability management software needs breadth and depth to help your organization understand, control, and report on the impact of your operations. The right solution enables you to analyze and manage your utility data at scale, present it to internal and external stakeholders, and reduce energy costs.

Tango Energy & Sustainability is the best sustainability management software for enterprises and SMBs alike because it offers a trifecta of sustainability solutions in a single system: carbon accounting software, sustainability reporting software, and energy management software. It turns your utility data into an asset you can actually use, and gives you the capabilities you need to extract and realize the long-term value your data holds.

Want to see what Tango Energy & Sustainability can do for you?

Request a demo today.