Equinox User Manual

A warm welcome to the Equinox world! These pages serve as general User Documentation for equinox. Technical documentation links are provided at the end of this page. If you are not at all familiar with the equinox platform, a high level overview of its objectives and capabilities is available in a brief functionality overview.

The Equinox platform is a versatile, cloud based framework that supports Sustainable Portfolio Management activities using an entirely modern approach. The mission of the platform is to help address the complexity of the enormous and multi-faceted sustainability challenge. The strategy is to use empowering aspects of modern digital technologies such as open source transparency, versatility, ubiquity, interoperability and scalability.

User Documentation Structure

The Getting Started page offers an overview of the functionality that is available across various equinox use cases. The more detailed Online User documentation of Equinox is structured along various dimensions:

• The “vertical”, or domain specific, dimension of concrete Workflows that implement specific sustainability protocols and standards. In this type of documentation a number of different Equinox concepts are discussed together to illustrate how one can compose these of similar workflows.
• The “horizontal” dimension of cross-cutting topics or elements that are applicable across all the supported application domains. These pages are more suitable for more in-depth (bottom up) study.
• The “app level” documentation that discusses the different distinct applications comprising Equinox. Schematically, one or more applications uses a number of elements to facilitate a workflow.

Specific objectives and workflows (Vertical dimension)

The following list highlights some workflows that are currently supported by the platform:

• The GHG Scope 2 Workflow focuses on Scope 2 (purchased electricity) accounting and reporting.
• The Equator Principles Workflows that tackle a number of use cases around Project Finance
• The Green Public Procurement Workflow that supports analysis conforming to the data models of the European Union TED platform.
• The CIRIS Workflow for compiling a City-wide emissions report
• The PCAF Mortgages Workflow for compling the emissions profile of a portfolio of mortgages (loans secured against real estate with measurable GHG emissions).
• The PCAF Project Finance Workflow
• The GHG Project Workflow that focuses on individual Project impact analysis (thus this is an example that does not need involve a portfolio).
• The Emission Factor Database Workflow illustrates working with reference data (in this case the IPCC emissions factor database)
• The EBA Scorecard for Project Finance implements a standardized credit scorecard for Project Finance

Cross-cutting topics and elements (The horizontal dimension)

• Application Pages document the conceptual User Interface that (in-particular) non-technical users will experience when working with the platform
• Support for diverse Data Types (numbers, text, geospatial information) is essential to help users to obtain holistic views of their portfolios

Equinox Apps

• The Portfolio App. The Portfolio App is the central app that provides the scaffolding for most other functionality provided by Equinox. At its core it is a uniform interface to the portfolio data.
• The Reference App. Reference data play an important role in sustainable portfolio management as they bring in and integrate new and granular information sources that were not previously used. Equinox aims to facilitate integrating relevant open data towards meeting portfolio management objectives.
• The Policy App. The Policy App helps collect and work with portfolio policy data.
• The Risk App. The Risk app is the primary means to apply risk analytics and risk models to the portfolio.
• The Reporting App. The Reporting app is where Equinox users can configure and obtain a variety of reports.

Technical Documentation and References

These pages serve as online user oriented documentation and supported portfolio management workflows.

• For technical documentation and installation and administration documentation please consult the online technical manual.
• Release Notes document the development of platform functionality.
• Documentation of Adopted Sustainability Standards and Further References.

NOTE: Equinox is still in active development. As the functionality of the platform is enhanced, this documentation will also be enriched and updated, following also our users feedback.

General Reading Recommendations