We benchmark the tight binding calculations against DFT on 31 different NBD/QC systems with promising properties collected from the literature. Based on a recent benchmark study by some of us, we use M06-2X/6-311+G(d) for the energy density, and the same method is also used for benchmarking the TBR barrier estimates. The sTDA-xTB UV-Vis spectrum of a charge-tagged NBD/QC carboxylate is benchmarked against the experimental result by Ugo et al. and several DFT calculations (Figure ). The relevant peak at 315 nm is blueshifted by just 10 nm by sTDA-xTB. In fact, sTDA-xTB performs better than 13 out of the 16 DFT functionals tested in a benchmark study, while requiring only a few seconds instead of several hours.