July 2023 Release Notes

Created by Olivia Gibson, Modified on Sun, 7 Jul, 2024 at 3:03 PM by Olivia Gibson

Summary

A demo instance creator makes it effortless for reseller partners to showcase the Thrust Calculator.
An improved date filter for generating reports allows users to select conventional accounting periods like months, quarters, halves, and years without the need for manual selection.
The platform now offers the New Zealand government's carbon calculation methodology, including the ability to vary emission factors for domestic flights based on aircraft size.
A new Car Mileage segment type is added, allowing users to specify driven distance, vehicle size, and fuel type for personal or fleet vehicles.
Bug fixes include isolating offset purchases from general traffic to prevent accidental double purchases and extending the validity period of password reset tokens. Additionally, a fix ensures that correct locations are calculated within rail segments.

Spotlight on: Demo instance creator

Relevant to:

Thrust Calculator resellers

What it is

Our platform (which, if you’re reading this, you probably know by now) contains comprehensive tooling for many travel and sustainability management use cases. But to make best use of them, you need to have a good set of dummy data and to have set up a target and budgets.

Our demo instance creator creates an instance with a full set of data and fully implemented targets and hierarchical departmental carbon budgets, enabling our reseller partners to give wow-factor demos without having to do a laborious set up first.

Getting started

To learn more about how to use this new ability, see the articles on creating and using a demo instance.

Rundown

Updates & New features

Improved date filter for generating reports

Relevant to:

Thrust Calculator users (Enterprise, Premium, Free-tier)
Thrust Calculator resellers

When generating a report, you no longer need to manually select the exact date range that you want to see - you can select conventional accounting periods like months, quarters, halves and years:

Multiple methodologies: New Zealand

Relevant to:

API users

We now offer the New Zealand government’s carbon calculation methodology via our API. This includes the ability to vary the emission factor for domestic flights based on the size of the craft - all you need to do is tell us the aircraft type being used on the flight. You can read more about this in the documentation.

Car mileage segment type

Relevant to:

Thrust Calculator users (Enterprise, Premium, Free-tier)
Thrust Calculator resellers
API users

This was one we didn’t get to in time for the last release notes, but we’re pleased to announce it now!

Not all driving for business purposes is in a hire car - that much is clear. And more than this: because the data point for a car trip in a personal or fleet vehicle is generated after the trip, we are more likely to know (a) the fuel type and (b) the actual distance travelled.

So we’ve created a Car Mileage segment type in which you can specify the driven distance, the vehicle size, as well as whether it was anything from a diesel to a battery electric vehicle.

Bug fixes

Summary	Description	Fix
Offset purchases going through without confirmation being shown to user	In rare cases, at times of exceptional system traffic, offset purchases would go through with the payment provider without the confirmation screen being shown to the purchaser. This meant in some cases that the purchaser would buy the same offsets twice.	We added a dedicated resource for offset purchases to isolate them from “general” traffic.
Password reset tokens were expiring before the user had a chance to do the reset.	As part of continual security improvements, we changed the user onboarding and password reset flows to expire the user password reset tokens after one hour. This was too short a period for most scenarios.	We slightly lengthened the period during which password reset tokens remain valid.
Unexpected locations were being calculated within rail segments	Where the user provides a Country code and City name, the platform should work out the rough location for that city in that country in the background. In certain cases, the platform was calculating the location based on another city with the same name, not in the specified country.	We updated the logic to ensure that both the country code and city name are used to calculate location as expected.

What’s next?

Adding Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF) net carbon reductions

Some of our customers have taken the plunge and bought SAF “claims”. We will add functionality to record a SAF net CO2 reduction claim against a customer instance and have that reflected in reporting.

What we didn’t finish in time for this edition

Carbon budgets PDF report

We’ve talked often about how important carbon budgets are for raising awareness of and accountability for carbon reduction targets within company environments. To enable that, we’ve been working with our customers and partners on a PDF report to reduce friction in how progress against carbon budgets is reported. At time of writing, this report is in testing and refinement; you’ll know when the report is ready to go!