Product Guides
Setting up your facilities in Dcycle
Create the facilities (sites, buildings, plants) that your Scope 1 and Scope 2 consumption data will be attached to.
Why facilities come first
Dcycle recommends creating your facilities at the very start of onboarding, as the foundation of your digital twin. Once they exist, every kWh of electricity, every litre of fuel and every kg of refrigerant you upload flows back to a specific site — letting you compare consumption and CO₂ between offices, factories and warehouses, spot the heavy emitters, and report at the level of detail your stakeholders actually need.
What is a facility?
A Facility is a factory, office, warehouse or any other site that you own or rent.
Coworking or shared offices?
If you work from a coworking space, hot-desk, or serviced office where you can't get the actual consumption (electricity, gas, water) and can't reasonably estimate it, don't create a facility for it. Report what you pay instead as Scope 3 → Purchased goods & services using a spend-based emission factor. That keeps the impact accounted for without inventing primary data you don't have.
Before you start
For each site you want to track, gather:
- The name you want it to appear under (e.g. “Madrid HQ”, “Warehouse Barcelona”)
- The country where it operates
- Whether the site is owned or rented
- Which consumption types you’ll be uploading invoices for (electricity, combustion, recharges, water…)
That’s it — you don’t need addresses, CUPS codes or any other reference numbers to create the facility. Those live on the invoices you upload later.
Two ways to create facilities
- Manual entry (one by one) — open Data → Facilities → + New facility and fill the form. Best for small fleets (under ~10 sites) or when you only want to add one new location.
- Excel bulk upload — for larger setups. Download the template from Data → Facilities → Import, fill one row per facility, and upload. The same required fields apply.
Two facility purposes
When you click + New facility, Dcycle asks you to pick the purpose first:
- Office or warehouse — the default for almost every site (offices, warehouses, factories, retail, distribution centres, data centres, etc.)
- Treatment plant — only for wastewater treatment plants, which need additional daily-measurement fields (water in/out, BOD, biogas routing, sludge…)
Pick Office or warehouse unless you’re specifically setting up a WWT plant.
Create the facility
After you pick the purpose, the form opens. Whether you go manual or Excel, every facility needs:
| Field | Required | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Organization | Required | The parent legal entity the facility belongs to. Auto-selected if you only manage one organization; picked manually in multi-company / holding setups |
| Name | Required | Anything that makes sense to your team — appears everywhere (dashboards, invoices, reports) |
| Type | Required | Rented or Owned — this is the legal relationship with the site, not the type of building |
| Country | Required | The country picker is searchable; flag and ISO code appear automatically |
| Active categories | Required, at least one | The consumption types this facility will record (see below) |
Click Create and the facility appears in Data → Facilities. You can edit any of these fields later.
Active categories explained
“Active categories” tells Dcycle which kinds of invoices you’ll be uploading for this site. Pick everything that applies — you can add or remove categories later.
| Category | What goes in it |
|---|---|
| Combustion | On-site fuel burning: natural gas, diesel, gasoline, LPG, fuel oil, coal, biomass, biogas |
| Electricity | Grid electricity consumption (kWh) |
| Recharge | Refills of refrigeration equipment, HVAC, and fire extinguishers |
| Water | Water consumption |
| Process | Direct emissions from chemical or physical reactions inherent to a production process (cement, lime, ammonia, etc.) |
| Wastewater treatment | Only available on Treatment plant facilities — daily WWT measurements |
Tip
If you're not sure which categories apply, pick the obvious ones (Electricity, Combustion) and add the rest later when you find the invoices. Removing or adding a category never deletes data.
Tips for setting up multiple sites
- One site, one facility. If you run two activities under the same roof (offices + warehouse in the same building), it’s usually fine to create one facility and treat them as a unit. Split only if you measure their consumption separately.
- One site can host multiple supply points. A single facility can have several electricity supply points (CUPS in Spain) and several gas contracts — you don’t need a facility per meter.
- Naming convention. Use a pattern like
City – Function(“Madrid – HQ”, “Barcelona – Warehouse”). It makes filters and reports much easier to read. - Shared invoices across facilities. If a single corporate invoice covers several sites, create each facility separately and split the consumption when you register the invoice — Dcycle supports percentage allocation per facility.
- Rented or shared offices (coworking, WeWork, Regus). Create the facility with Type = Rented and only enable the categories your contract gives you visibility into (often just Electricity, sometimes Combustion if you receive a separate gas bill).
- Sites in different countries. Always create a separate facility per country — emission factors (especially for electricity) differ by national grid.
Treatment plants are different
If you operate a wastewater treatment plant, pick Treatment plant as the purpose. Dcycle will enable additional fields for daily water flow, BOD, nitrogen, sludge and biogas routing — these drive CH₄ and N₂O calculations that don't apply to regular offices or factories.
After creating your facilities
Once your facilities exist, you’re ready to upload data:
- Start with the Scope 1 & 2 primary data checklist to know exactly what to collect per category
- For bulk uploads, see Import data via CSV
- For Spanish electricity, see Connect Datadis for automatic electricity data
If you ever close, sell or stop operating a site, archive the facility rather than delete it — Dcycle keeps the historical consumption visible in past-year reports.
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