How One Dutch Startup Eliminated 4 Hours of Weekly Admin With a Simple Idea
Every business owner knows the frustration: small administrative tasks that eat away at your week, one forgotten form at a time.
For companies with shared vehicles in the Netherlands, mileage tracking is one of those tasks. Dutch tax law requires businesses to log every trip within 48 hours—who drove, where they went, and the odometer reading. Miss it, and you risk fines during audits.
The traditional solution? Expensive GPS trackers bolted to dashboards, costing hundreds per vehicle plus installation fees. Or the reality for most small businesses: a crumpled notebook in the glovebox and weekly email reminders that everyone ignores.
The team behind RitScan asked a simple question: what if you didn't need hardware at all?
Their solution uses two things everyone already has—a calendar and a phone camera. Connect your Google Calendar, and the system detects when someone has a client visit scheduled. After the meeting, they get an automatic reminder to log their mileage. For spontaneous trips, there's a QR code in the car: scan it, enter the odometer reading, done in 30 seconds.
No GPS tracker. No monthly hardware fees. No installation appointment.
The insight that makes it work is behavioral, not technical. People forget to log trips not because logging is hard, but because there's no prompt at the right moment. A reminder email three days later competes with everything else in your inbox. A QR code staring at you from the dashboard while you're already in the car? That's the moment when logging actually happens.
For small businesses, the math is straightforward. Traditional fleet tracking runs €15-30 per vehicle per month, plus upfront hardware costs. RitScan starts free for a single vehicle, with plans for larger fleets at a fraction of the cost.
It's a reminder that sometimes the best solutions aren't about adding technology—they're about removing it.