The column
that wasn't there.

Somewhere in a Swiss invoice management system, on a row that records a litre of diesel purchased by a small manufacturing firm in Zurich, there has always been a missing column.

Not a missing calculation — invoices have always known their totals, their VAT, their due dates. But the column that would say what this line item cost the atmosphere, in a number a Swiss auditor could trace back to its source six years from now, has quietly refused to exist. Not because the data was unavailable. Because nobody in the room where invoices get digitised had also been in the room where emission factors get maintained, and the two rooms rarely meet.

cobank was built to add that column.

It is a narrow ambition, stated plainly, and the narrowness is the point. Carbon accounting software has for years tried to solve the problem by asking companies to enter new data — spreadsheets of kilowatt hours, surveys of employee commutes, spend-based estimates rounded to the nearest continent. cobank begins from the opposite assumption: the data already exists. Every litre of fuel, every kilowatt hour, every kilometre of freight is already written down, somewhere, on an invoice a Swiss business is legally required to keep for ten years. The work is not to collect it again. The work is to read what is already there, assign it to the correct emission factor at the date it occurred, and hand the result to an auditor who can check every step.

cobank is what that question becomes when it is finally given the time and the detail it deserves.

Why now

cobank was started by Frédéric Beckmann in St. Gallen in 2025 out of a specific frustration: the existing carbon-accounting tools were built for the pre-Omnibus market — dashboards with industry-average estimates, designed to help a CFO tell a good story. Meanwhile, Big 4 sustainability-assurance teams began asking for evidence at the line-item level: invoice by invoice, factor by factor, with a hash chain underneath. When Omnibus I took effect in March 2026, the shape of the problem shifted again: fewer companies in mandatory CSRD scope, but every mid-sized Swiss exporter now exposed to VSME-shape requests from EU customers, Swiss banks, and procurement tenders. cobank is built for the new shape — a defensible number a mid-market CFO can produce in a day, with an audit surface underneath that a Big 4 partner will recognise.

What cobank is now

cobank reads invoices, assigns each line item to a versioned emission factor, records the calculation in a form an auditor can verify, and returns a number. That is the whole product. Everything else — the statement, the ledger, the report, the audit trail — is scaffolding around that single operation, built the way a Swiss accounting system would be built if one were designing it from scratch in 2026 for businesses that will still exist in 2036.

Two things cobank will not do, stated here because the absences matter at least as much as the presences. It will not sell carbon offsets, recommend them, or take a cut from anyone who does. And it will not quietly change a historical calculation when an emission factor is updated next year — the factor that was current on the date of the invoice is the factor that remains attached to it, forever. That is a reproducibility promise, not a marketing phrase.

If you run a business in Switzerland or the European Union and you have been told you need to report your emissions, there are three things you can do from here. You can open the demo sandbox and see what cobank looks like on 186 real line items — it takes a moment to provision and resets itself after a week. You can read the methodology page, which explains, at more length than is strictly polite, exactly how every number on the screen was produced. Or you can write to frederic@cobank.ai with a question, a correction, or an invoice you'd like to see handled well. All three go to the same place, eventually.