Upload employee commuting from your own survey

Before you start

You need the Editor role in your Dcycle organization.

When to use this

Dcycle can send the mobility survey to your employees for you, but you don’t have to use it. Upload a file instead when:

• You already run your own survey. Many companies collect commuting data in their own systems — an HR platform, an internal form, an intranet questionnaire — and simply want the results in Dcycle. Export your responses, map them to the template columns and upload.
• Your survey is anonymous. If you don’t collect employee emails, you can still upload the data. The email column is optional.
• You are loading past years. For a base year or a historical inventory, sending a survey is not an option — the file is the only way.

The calculation is exactly the same either way. A commuting record uploaded from a file and one collected through the Dcycle survey are treated identically.

Steps

Step 1

Click “Data” in the left navigation, then “Categories”, and open the “Workforce” category.

Step 2

“Workforce” groups three sub-topics. Open “Commuting surveys” — that is where commuting data lives, both the survey Dcycle sends and the data you upload yourself.

The “Company employees” list further down that same page is a different thing: it registers your staff, not their commutes. Its “Bulk upload” button uploads employees, not trips.

Step 3

Click “Add data”.

Step 4

Choose “Upload commuting”.

Mind the option just below it: “Send survey by email” sends the Dcycle survey to your employees, and that one does require their email addresses. To upload data you collected yourself, you want “Upload commuting”.

Step 5

The import wizard opens. If you don’t have a file yet, download a template with the “Excel template” or “CSV template” button and fill it in — one row per employee and commuting period. Supported formats are CSV, XLSX and XLS.

Template column headers tell you what is expected: columns marked (optional) can be left empty, columns marked (if applicable) are only required in certain cases, and columns with no suffix are always required.

Step 6

Drag your file onto the panel or click to browse. You can also paste the data straight from a spreadsheet with Ctrl+V.

Step 7

The “Columns” step matches each column of your file to a Dcycle field, with a confidence score and a sample of your data. If your export uses different header names, fix the match here with the dropdowns.

Look at the labels on the left: “Start date” and “Transport type” carry a red asterisk — they are the only always-required fields. “Employee email” and “Employee name” show as Conditional, “Required depending on row values”: you need one of the two, not both.

Step 8

If a “Values” step appears, it shows how the values in your file map to the values Dcycle accepts — transport modes, fuel types, vehicle sizes. Review the suggestions and fix anything that wasn’t recognised.

Step 9

The “Review” step summarises valid rows and errors, and lets you fix any cell right there. In the example above, all five rows are valid with the email column completely empty.

Step 10

Submit. Each row becomes a commuting period for that employee, and emissions are calculated automatically.

Filling in the template

Column	Required	What to enter
Employee email	Either this or the name	The employee’s email. Leave empty for anonymous surveys
Employee name	Either this or the email	Name or employee ID — any identifier works
Start date	Yes	Start of the period this row covers
End date	No	End of the period. Leave empty for an open period
Transport type	Yes	Car, Bus, Train, Metro, Tram, Trolleybus, Motorbike, Bicycle, Electric kick scooter, Walking or Telecommuting
Vehicle size	Only for Car	Small, Medium or Large
Fuel type	For motorised modes	Must match the mode — a bus takes diesel, petrol, LPG, natural gas or unknown; a car also takes hybrid and electric
Carpool	Only for Car	Yes divides the result by three
Total km	Yes, except Telecommuting	One-way distance. Dcycle multiplies by two for the return trip
Daily trips	No	Between 1 and 3. Defaults to 1
Weekly travel days	No	Commuting days per week. Defaults to 5
Weekly telecommuting days	No	Days worked from home. Defaults to 0
Hours worked per day	No	Defaults to 8
Origin / Destination	No	Free text, descriptive only
Company	No	Only for holdings — routes the row to a subsidiary

Two things worth knowing about how the calculation works:

• Total km is one way. Dcycle doubles it and multiplies by the commuting days within the period, subtracting the country’s public holidays automatically. If you enter the full round trip, your emissions will be double what they should be.
• Walking, non-electric bicycle and telecommuting have an emission factor of zero. Include those rows anyway — they document your modal split and improve the representativeness of your data.

Anonymous surveys

If your survey doesn’t collect emails, leave the email column empty and use the name column as an identifier:

1. Leave “Employee email” empty in every row.
2. In “Employee name”, enter an identifier: Employee 1, Employee 2, or your internal HR code. The column accepts a name or an employee ID.
3. Use a different identifier for each person. Dcycle identifies employees by that value: if two rows repeat the same identifier, they are treated as the same person and the periods stack up on that single employee record.

A person can legitimately have several rows — that is how you split one employee across transport modes, or across different periods of the year. Just make sure each row that should belong to the same person carries the same identifier, and rows for different people carry different ones.

What if you only have aggregate data?

The importer works employee by employee — there is no headcount column. If your survey gives you an average distance and a modal split for the whole workforce rather than individual answers, split it into rows: one row per employee and transport mode, with the kilometres apportioned by the share of that mode.

If instead your problem is response rate — you have individual answers, but only from part of your workforce — don’t build synthetic rows. Upload the real responses and use the estimation feature to cover the rest.