Home office
Claim home office costs through your Estonian OÜ tax free: Arvello generates the agreement and board decision, then applies agreed proportions to monthly bills.
If you run your OÜ (the Estonian private limited company) from home, the company can reimburse a share of your home running costs — electricity, heating, internet — free of tax. Estonia has no flat-rate home office allowance, though: every euro has to rest on a documented agreement, a defensible proportion and the actual bills.
That paperwork is exactly what Arvello automates. You set the workspace up once, and each month you type in the bills while Arvello applies the agreed proportions and keeps the records EMTA (the Estonian Tax and Customs Board) would want to see. You'll find it under Expenses → Home Office.
The agreement
The foundation is a written agreement between the company and the person working from home, plus a board decision documenting the business purpose — which rooms, what share of which expenses. Arvello generates both documents as PDFs from the details you enter, ready to sign and keep. The person must exist in your people list first (employee or board member) — see People.
Setting it up
Workspace details
Choose the person, enter the home address, the total home area and the workspace area in square metres, and whether the workspace is dedicated (used only for work) or shared with living space. Arvello calculates the base proportion from the areas — 12 m² of a 60 m² flat is 20% — and halves it if the space is shared, so the same room used as a living room too would give 10%.
Expense proportions
Each expense type gets its own proportion, pre-filled with sensible starting points: electricity and heating at the workspace proportion, internet suggested at 70% (it's mostly work when you work remotely), water at 15% (office work doesn't move the needle much). You can adjust each individually. Anything above 50% triggers a warning that EMTA may question it — the proportion needs to be one you can justify.
Review and create
Set the agreement date, add any notes, and create the agreement. From the agreement page you can download both documents — Download Agreement (PDF) and Download Board Decision (PDF).
ℹ️Working from outside Estonia?
If the person isn't an Estonian tax resident, Arvello shows a warning before the agreement is created: reimbursing home utilities through an Estonian company while working from another country can create permanent establishment risk there — meaning local corporate tax obligations. Laptops, software and cloud services are generally unproblematic regardless of location; home utilities are the risky category.
Monthly claims
Once the agreement is active, each month is one claim. Click Submit Monthly Claim, pick the agreement and the month (one claim per month per agreement), and enter the total amount from each bill — electricity, heating, internet, water and other utilities. Arvello applies the agreed proportion to each and shows the reimbursable, tax-free total, along with the running total for the year.
The split of labour is deliberately simple:
- You enter: the areas (once), and the full bill amounts each month.
- Arvello calculates: the proportions, the reimbursable amount per category and in total, the annual running total, the comparison against paying the same money as salary, and the agreement and board decision documents.
A claim is marked Paid when you reconcile the reimbursement payment in your bank feed as a Home Office Reimbursement — see Reconciling transactions.
What's in and what's out
Utilities and similar running costs can be reimbursed proportionally. Some home costs sit outside the scheme entirely — reimbursing mortgage payments, housing association repair-fund contributions, land tax or home insurance counts as a fringe benefit and is taxed accordingly. Keep the original bills behind every claim: Estonian accounting rules require documents to be retained for 7 years.
⚠️Disclaimer