Screen IT-services travel and commuting using the actual work pattern
A delivery-centre badge file can both overcount and miss commuting. Overnight staff appear on two calendar dates for one shift, while employees at a client site may never appear in that building’s access system. Start with the actual work pattern, then reconstruct the journeys. An attendance total alone cannot describe the travel.
This guide is for IT-services delivery, HR, travel and inventory teams preparing activity records. It assumes the reporting owner has already decided the population and treatment of each arrangement. Use the broader Scope 3 screening guide for category-level questions. Here, the task is narrower: identify movements that the selected records do and do not support.
Keep shifts and journeys in separate records
The Welsh Government’s 2026 reporting guide, section 8.3, describes staff surveys of commuting distance and mode and highlights possible sampling bias. That public-sector guidance supplies context, not an Indian reporting requirement. The shift-based test below is an original fictional records exercise.
A shift record explains where and when someone worked. A journey record explains a movement between places. Link them without assuming that each calendar date with a badge event means a new return commute, or that a person can only make one type of journey during a shift.
Give each shift a stable reference, a coded employee reference, its start and finish, the relevant time zone and the work arrangement. Give each journey its own reference, departure and arrival points at the necessary level of detail, time, mode, purpose and supporting record. Keep names, home addresses and raw access logs with authorised custodians rather than circulating them in the reporting summary.
Build the fictional team’s work pattern
Twelve employees each complete five shifts, giving 60 employee-shifts. The week starts on 5 October 2026; all times use India Standard Time (UTC+05:30). The exercise covers the five shifts starting Monday through Friday and their associated journeys, including Saturday morning returns. It is a closed teaching window, not a rule for allocating real journeys across a reporting cut-off.
Six hybrid engineers each work three shifts entirely at home and two daytime shifts at the delivery centre: 18 home shifts and 12 centre shifts.
Four analysts each work one shift at home and four daytime shifts at a regular client worksite: four home shifts and 16 client shifts.
Two support engineers each work five overnight centre shifts, arriving for work at 22:00 and finishing at 06:00 the next morning: ten centre shifts.
The check is 22 home shifts + 12 daytime centre shifts + 16 client shifts + ten overnight centre shifts = 60. For this example, the owner’s documented policy treats the stated residence-to-regular-worksite journeys as commuting. All journeys use third-party transport. There are no company-owned vehicles, temporary assignments or unresolved purpose decisions in this closed case.
Reconstruct movements before multiplying attendance
Travel confirmations establish one direct outward journey and one direct return journey for every attended shift. The hybrid engineers use rail, the client-site analysts use buses, and the overnight engineers use taxis. No commuting journey occurs during the 22 stipulated full-home shifts. These are explicit fictional facts, not conclusions inferred from a missing badge entry.
The supported commuting schedule therefore contains 12 × 2 = 24 rail passenger legs, 16 × 2 = 32 bus passenger legs and ten × 2 = 20 taxi passenger legs. Together, these are 76 commuter passenger legs associated with 38 attended shifts. They are counts of movements, not kilometres or emissions.
Each overnight engineer has five arrivals from Monday to Friday and five departures from Tuesday to Saturday. Their badge events consequently touch six calendar dates. A shortcut that counts distinct employee-and-date combinations sees twelve overnight attendance dates across the two people. Multiplying those twelve by two produces 24 supposed commuter legs, four more than the 20 actually supported.
Now apply that same shortcut to the entire company-building badge file. It sees twelve daytime employee-dates plus twelve overnight employee-dates and produces 48 commuter legs. The correct case count is 76. The difference is not simply an omitted client population: the shortcut loses 32 client-site legs while adding four nonexistent overnight legs. Its net understatement of 28 conceals both defects.
Repair the link between events and shifts rather than subtracting four from every future extract. An overnight engineer could leave during a shift, return after an incident or use a different entrance. Pairing the first and last badge events mechanically would still not establish the route, mode or number of actual journeys.
Look for business travel inside an attended shift
On one of their centre shifts, two hybrid engineers take the same taxi to a client meeting and return together to the centre. The two taxi bookings are confirmed completed. Each engineer still makes the ordinary rail commute already counted. The meeting adds four business passenger legs: two people travelling outward and the same two travelling back.
The work-pattern schedule still totals 60 shifts. No shift needs relabelling as wholly away on business. A system that searches for business travel only on days marked business-away would miss this movement. Keep the meeting journeys linked to their business purpose while retaining the existing commuting records.
The taxi evidence describes two vehicle legs carrying two employees each. Preserve both facts. Four passenger legs are not four taxi runs. The complete case has 76 commuting passenger legs and four business passenger legs, giving 80 passenger movements across the selected work pattern. That reconciliation does not provide a transport distance or a calculation-ready emissions input.
Ask for the missing calculation inputs precisely
The Welsh guide distinguishes vehicle-kilometres from passenger-kilometres. Obtain the distance and mode detail required by the chosen calculation method. Preserve shared-ride occupancy; passenger counts alone cannot establish vehicle activity.
Check survey representation across daytime, overnight and client-deployed staff. Record non-response. Do not extrapolate this fictional week without evidence that the wider work pattern is represented.
Similarly, a full-home shift establishes the absence of the stipulated commute in this case. It does not establish zero work-related energy or an emissions saving. Home energy, office energy and other movements need their own evidence if they enter the chosen reporting boundary.
Hand over the shift list, journey list, their links and the unresolved inputs together. Ask a reviewer to reproduce 60 shifts, 76 commuting legs and four business passenger legs, then trace the overnight and meeting exceptions. Record the approved period and treatment separately; the inventory methods-note guide explains a reproducible handover. A reconciled activity schedule is the starting point for calculation, not independent assurance.
Source checked 14 October 2026: Welsh Government, Welsh Public Sector Net Zero Reporting Guide (2026), sections 8.2–8.4. Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. This fictional case implies no official endorsement.
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