Excel audit trail

Show what changed, who changed it and who approved it

When a number is wrong or a row is marked “approved,” you need evidence, not a guess. SheetDelta keeps an exportable record for critical workbooks: every version, every change, every comment and every sign-off, with the person who made it attached.

The cell says “approved.” Who typed it?

An audit team opens a reporting workbook and finds a status column where rows read approved. That seems reasonable until someone asks who approved them, and when, and against which version of the numbers. Excel can’t say. The cell holds the word, but not the act. There is no record that anyone reviewed anything; there is just text that someone, at some point, was able to type.

The same gap shows up the moment a figure turns out to be wrong. SharePoint can tell you the file changed and who saved it, but not which cell moved, or why. You can roll Q3_model_final_v2.xlsx back to last week, and still have no idea what was different about last week. An audit trail is supposed to answer exactly these questions, and for most spreadsheets nothing is keeping one.

What a real audit trail records

Not a list of timestamps. A defensible record of every change and every decision, attached to the cell and the person.

Every version, kept and comparable

Cell-level who and what

Comments and decisions, in line

Approvals that are recorded, not assumed

What each layer records

Excel stores the workbook. SharePoint stores the file. Neither stores the evidence.

	Excel alone	SharePoint history
Who changed this version, and who approved it	—	Saved-by only
What the value was before	—	—
Approval recorded as an event	—	—
Comment thread tied to the change	Per-cell notes	—
Compare two arbitrary versions	—	—
Exportable record of the review	—	—
Survives a file emailed outside the tenant	—	—

SharePoint and OneDrive version history are a genuine backup, and you should keep them. They record who saved each file, which is not the same as what changed inside it or who approved the change.

An approval should be an event, not a word in a cell

The difference between “we think this was reviewed” and “this was reviewed” is a recorded sign-off. In SheetDelta, an approval names the person, the moment, and the exact set of changes it covers. If a control file requires two distinct reviewers, the trail shows both, and shows that the author didn’t approve their own work.

That’s the version of an audit trail that holds up when finance, internal audit, or an external examiner is the one reading it. For the workbooks where it matters, you can also require that sign-off before a change is distributed. See how the hosted platform handles review and approval gates, or how this fits a broader spreadsheet governance approach.

The record itself

What a signed-off review prints to: who opened it and when, the SHA-256 of both versions compared, what changed by kind and by sheet, and the decision, on one page you can hand to whoever asks.

The record it prints to. Every signed-off review prints to one page: who opened it and when, the SHA-256 of both versions compared, what changed by kind and by sheet, and the decision. You can hand it to whoever asks what happened to the model.

Screenshots of the hosted platform. The workbook is our demo model, and no customer data appears anywhere on this site.

Frequently asked questions

Does Excel have a built-in audit trail?

Not in a form you could hand to an auditor. Legacy “Track Changes” only worked in shared workbooks and is gone from the modern co-authoring model; cell comments and the change history are not a record of who changed which value. For a real trail you need a layer that captures every version, compares it, and attaches an author and approvals. See track changes in Excel for what the built-in features do.

How do I create an audit trail for an Excel workbook?

Point SheetDelta at the SharePoint library where the workbook already lives. From then on, every saved version is compared against the last, each change is tied to its author, comments and approvals are recorded, and the whole thing is exportable. Nobody has to remember to log anything, because the trail builds itself from the saves people already make.

Can someone edit the history afterwards?

The record is kept outside the workbook, so overwriting the file does not change what was recorded, and reopening a signed-off review is itself an audited action. Every version is stored with its SHA-256, so you can check whether the file in front of you is the one that was reviewed. We do not sign or seal the export itself, so treat it as a record from our system rather than as independent cryptographic proof.

Can I export it for auditors?

Yes. The trail exports to a file you can hand to finance, internal audit, or an external examiner: every version, change, comment and approval, with authors and timestamps. Teams use it where “last modified by” on a file is not enough to answer the question.

Does it work across two versions that were never connected?

Yes. You can compare any two versions, including a copy that was emailed outside the tenant and came back renamed, and see the full set of changes between them rather than only the most recent save. See compare two Excel files.