Calculations are at the hearth of any reporting system. 

SERAM provides you with a rich formula language for writing calculations based on other inputs or also other calculations.

Calculations in SERAM are consolidation-aware, which is necessary to produce correct results when computing data consolidated over multiple levels.

Assume, for instance, a business unit BU with two sites S1/S2 underneath, and some indicators:

• FTE: FTE employees (reported on the site)
• ELEC: Electric energy consumtion GJ (reported on the site)
• EM-FACT: Emissions tCO2e factor per GJ of electrity mix (reported on the site)
• ELEC-EM: Emissions tCO2e from electrity (calculation: ELEC * EM-FACT)
• FTE-EM: Emissions tCO2e per FTE (calculation: ELEM-EM / FTE)

For the sites and the BU, the effectively performed calculation must be as follows to yield correct results:

• Emissions tCO2e from electrity:
  ELEC-EM[S1] = ELEC[S1] * EM-FACT[S1]
  ELEC-EM[S2] = ELEC[S2] * EM-FACT[S2]
  ELEC-EM[BU] = (ELEC[S1] * EM-FACT[S1]) + (ELEC[S2] * EM-FACT[S2])
  
• Emissions tCO2e per FTE
  FTE-EM[S1] = ELEC-EM[S1] / FTE[S1]
  FTE-EM[S2] = ELEC-EM[S2] / FTE[S2]
  FTE-EM[BU] = (ELEC-EM[S1] + ELEC-EM[S2]) / (FTE[S1] + FTE[S2])

Note the difference at the BU level. For the first calculation, the multiplication with the factor needs to be done on each site, and the result is summed up afterwards. This is necessary since there is no known factor at the BU level; taking an average of the sites would not be correct (but this type of mistake is commonly done when using Excel or similar tools). On the second calculation, however, the sum of the emissions must be divided by the sum of the FTE. Summing up the values of S1 and S2 would in this case be incorrect.