Meet Rudolf
Hello everyone, my name is Rudolf, I am 37yo. By trade, I am a certified inspection technician for electrical installations and lightning protection systems up to 1,000V, as well as a designer of electrical distribution networks and lightning rods. I run my own business, Elektroinštalácie Poprad, s.r.o., operating in the electrical contracting industry.
However, since I was a kid, coding, technology, and building things from scratch have been my true passion. Whenever we hit a bottleneck in our company, my instinct was always to write software to solve it. I built a custom warehouse management app for my team so they always know our exact on-hand inventory and what needs to be picked up from the wholesale supplier, and I also built our internal software for handling technical electrical inspections.
Programming is my hobby and creative outlet. I also have young children, so developing ReClaim Miles wasn’t done in a corporate high-rise—it was coded late at night at my desk after putting the kids to bed. Because I am balancing family life and running a contracting business, I don’t have large in-house testing teams, and finding reliable testers is always a challenge. That is why user feedback from communities like yours is so vital to me.
What inspired you to build ReClaim Miles?
The spark came directly from my own real-world panic. I live in Slovakia. Up until January 1, 2026, our local tax laws regarding vehicle travel were relatively relaxed, and keeping an ultra-detailed, minute-by-minute logbook wasn’t aggressively enforced for many small businesses. But starting with the new year, the regulations tightened significantly.
I’ll be honest: I was quite careless when it came to vehicle recordkeeping. When the rules shifted, my company vehicle travel logs were definitely not in order. I found myself staring at a massive administrative nightmare and needed a way to reconstruct our logs retrospectively from actual, physical evidence—service invoices, fuel slips, and job documentation.
I spent night after night figuring out the mathematics and routing logic until I succeeded in building an engine that could accurately recreate those logs from source paperwork. Once it worked, I realized: this is a massive problem that other entrepreneurs face every day.
However, Slovakia is a country of only 5 million people. Only about 10% are registered entrepreneurs, and a good portion of them already rely on hardware GPS tracking. The domestic market was simply too small to build a sustainable software business. Because the core physics and mathematical principles of ReClaim Miles work universally, I decided to target the massive U.S. market—aligning the logic with IRS Publication 463 standards. My goal is to build a successful product, generate growth capital, and eventually transition to working on my software passion full-time.
What makes ReClaim Miles fundamentally different from traditional mileage tracking tools?
Traditional tools demand continuous monitoring: you have to remember to run their app, leave real-time background GPS tracking enabled, drain your phone battery, and pay ongoing monthly fees forever. For a busy tradesperson or contractor, that breaks down quickly.
ReClaim Miles differs in three fundamental ways:
- Evidence-driven reconstruction instead of live GPS: We do not track your phone, record real-time location, or drain your battery. It reconstructs past records from evidence you already hold—odometer baselines, receipts, service paperwork, and documented client visits.
- True physical simulation: Trips aren’t just drawn as arbitrary lines. The engine replays journeys across gasoline, diesel, or EV battery profiles to ensure tank volume and energy states remain physically consistent throughout the timeline.
- Local privacy & tamper-evident export: Your database, client addresses, and documents stay 100% on your local computer. When finalized, periods are committed with Merkle-root signatures and SHA-256 manifests that can be independently audited by a CPA.
How does ReClaim Miles reconstruct a vehicle’s travel history from incomplete records?
The backbone of the engine is what we call Odometer Anchors. An anchor is an immovable, third-party documented data point—such as an annual mechanic inspection invoice or an oil change receipt showing your exact odometer reading on a specific date.
You enter those known points, and the engine freezes those dates and odometer figures in place. It then routes legitimate business trips between job sites and suppliers over real road network maps, systematically balancing mileage so the reconstructed timeline reconciles precisely to your ending odometer anchor. If a travel sequence violates working hours, dwell times, or physical vehicle limits, the engine flags or rejects it rather than generating fictional numbers.
What are the biggest mistakes taxpayers make when documenting business mileage?
- Relying on rounded estimates: Submitting a clean “10,000 miles” without granular daily proof or contemporaneous documentation is an instant audit trigger under Treas. Reg. § 1.274-5.
- Counting commuting miles: Assuming the daily commute from home to a primary office or depot qualifies as deductible travel. Commuting is strictly personal and non-deductible.
- Contradicting external paperwork: Presenting a logbook claiming your car traveled 300 miles across the state on a day when a garage repair invoice proves it was sitting on a lift. Third-party paperwork always disproves an unsupported log.
- Disregarding fleet size limits: Using standard mileage rates across fleets of five or more vehicles operated simultaneously, which violates IRS Publication 463 limitations.
What does “data sovereignty” mean for an ordinary small-business owner using the product?
As a small-business owner myself, it means peace of mind that your business data remains strictly yours.
Modern SaaS subscriptions expect you to upload your client databases, project locations, and route histories onto external cloud servers. ReClaim Miles is a local-first desktop application. All records, address directories, and receipt images reside locally in %APPDATA% on your PC. Routing works offline through downloaded map modules, and if you use our smart AI document parsing, requests go directly through your own personal API key without intermediate servers. We cannot view, monetize, or accidentally leak your private business operations.
How do you see AI changing tax preparation and financial recordkeeping?
AI transforms recordkeeping from manual clerical labor into intelligent supervision. In my own company, sorting through stacks of wholesale receipts, fuel slips, and invoices used to consume whole weekends. Today, multimodal OCR and vision models can ingest dozens of messy invoices, extracting dates, amounts, and vendor locations in a matter of seconds.
The primary role of AI shouldn’t be to guess your tax position, but to stage and validate messy raw documentation so that human professionals, business owners, and CPAs can review clear, structured data with full transparency.
What’s the most difficult mileage reconstruction scenario your software can handle?
Mixed-powertrain, multi-vehicle fleets operating with fragmented receipt archives.
Imagine managing a mixed setup: an electric runabout alongside a heavy diesel utility van. The engine has to parse unassigned fuel slips and charging logs, map them to the proper vehicle profiles, apply different powertrain physics (kWh battery efficiency curves vs. diesel fuel consumption), observe working hours, and align all movement to fixed mechanic inspection anchors months apart. Ensuring the timeline holds together without breaking logical or physical continuity is a demanding engineering problem.
What’s one piece of advice you’d give every independent contractor about documenting business travel?
Guard your third-party service invoices like gold.
Fuel slips, tire change receipts, and annual vehicle maintenance invoices are your most powerful defense. If you get busy and fall behind on daily logging, an official service invoice showing your vehicle’s VIN, the date, and an exact odometer reading gives you an unshakeable factual anchor that makes retrospective, legally compliant reconstruction possible.
Did you enjoy our interview? Do you have anything to say to our community?
I truly enjoyed answering these questions! Because I am a solo developer writing code late at night alongside my day job and family life, community feedback is everything to me.
As mentioned, testing across hundreds of different real-world scenarios is tough on my own. ReClaim Miles is actively in Release Beta, and we run an ongoing bug bounty: if you test the software and find a reproducible bug or provide actionable feedback, you qualify for a 100% free Lifetime License.
I invite you to test out ReClaim Miles, run the interactive demo in your browser, or download the 14-day evaluation for your PC. Thank you for supporting independent builders!
