CBAM reporting software: from installation data to the filed declaration

The obligation follows the goods. Import cement, iron and steel, aluminium, fertilisers, electricity or hydrogen into the EU, each sector defined by CN code in Annex I, and the carbon embedded in them carries a price at the border, the same price a European plant pays. The one exemption is small: below 50 tonnes of imports a year you are out of scope, a threshold that excuses about 182,000 importers while keeping over 99% of the embedded emissions in scope. Whether a specific code is caught is a lookup, not a judgment call: check the commodity code, or read how the whole mechanism works.

What you owe comes in three parts. An annual declaration of embedded emissions to the CBAM Registry, due the following 30 September, filed by an authorised declarant. Certificates, one per tonne of embedded CO2, priced off the EU ETS auction, with at least 50% of the running total held each quarter and the rest surrendered once a year. And the audit trail: every figure traceable to the installation that emitted it, kept for ten years.

CBAM is emissions accounting with a customs deadline, and Bindu is the pipeline that does the accounting. It reaches every third-country installation behind a shipment and collects the activity data in the format the plant keeps it: direct emissions, the electricity behind them, and any carbon price already paid. Every line of the shipment maps to its Annex I CN code, so only goods actually in scope are declared, and the 50-tonne threshold is tracked as you go.

From that data it computes the embedded emissions per tonne by the method fixed in Annex IV: direct, plus indirect for cement and fertilisers, minus the Article 9 deduction for carbon already paid at origin, with the Commission’s default values as the fallback where installation data is missing. The annual declaration is assembled and filed to the CBAM Registry under your EORI, the certificate ledger tracks the ETS-linked price, the 50% quarterly hold and the annual surrender, and the ten-year audit trail keeps every figure tied to the installation that emitted it. The CBAM page walks the same pipeline in seven moves.

A declaration built entirely on the Commission’s default values is a legal declaration. It is rarely a cheap one: the defaults are set conservatively, so the fallback almost always costs you more than the real number, and from 2027 the default is the exception rather than the rule. Verified actual data from the installation takes precedence, and it is the route that rewards the right suppliers, because you pay for the real carbon and a producer who decarbonised undercuts one who did not. Collecting actuals is the unglamorous part, reaching plants, chasing activity data, routing it to an accredited verifier, and it is the part of the pipeline Bindu runs for you. Where a plant does not answer, the defaults keep the declaration legal, at the conservative price.

Bindu’s CBAM software is for teams whose job is moving goods: import and customs managers, procurement, the trade-compliance desk of a group that suddenly owns a carbon obligation. It assumes no emissions expertise on your side. We bring the infrastructure and run the filing end to end; you connect the data you already have, an ERP or a spreadsheet, and nobody retypes anything. The price is published, not quoted: €719 a quarter to run, €199 a filing, €2,876 a year all in, well under the enterprise tools it replaces. Onboarding starts with a demo on your own shipments.