Short answer: yes, an Excel mileage logbook is perfectly legal in Estonia. The law doesn't prescribe a format, it prescribes content. The longer answer starts with «but» — and that «but» decides whether your reimbursement survives an MTA audit.
How to build the sheet
One row per trip, columns kept simple. In practice this layout works:
| Date | Start | End | Km | Route | Purpose |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 03.04 | 41 250 | 41 318 | 68 | Tallinn–Tartu | Client meeting |
| 05.04 | 41 318 | 41 354 | 36 | Tartu–Põlva | Site inspection |
| 05.04 | 41 354 | 41 422 | 68 | Põlva–Tartu | Return trip |
Add two rows at the end of the month — total km and the reimbursement (km × €0.50). If the required fields or the calculation feel unclear, they're spelled out in the logbook guide and on the reimbursement page. This article is about Excel itself, so it won't repeat them.
Where Excel falls down
An Excel file keeps no history. Open it in November, fix one October figure, and nobody knows anything changed. An auditor knows this too — and knows what to look for. A tidied-up sheet gives itself away through round kilometres, repeating routes, and suspiciously smooth months where every total lands right on the limit.
Excel isn't illegal. It's simply weak as evidence exactly where evidence matters most. And if the logbook is deemed unreliable, you don't lose a formality — you lose the exemption: the whole reimbursement gets taxed retroactively as salary.
When Excel stops working
For one person with a couple of trips a month, Excel honestly does the job. The strain comes with volume. Once trips run into the dozens, or several employees drive, you spend more time hunting and fixing errors than logging trips — and every hand-typed number is a place for one to creep in. Scaling the records across a team is its own topic, covered in the logbook for companies article.