For accountants

The residency record you wish your clients kept.

Whereabouts logs which state your client is in on every day of the year, automatically, from their iPhone. At the end of the year they send you one spreadsheet, so there is no reconstruction from credit card statements and no gaps to argue over.

What you receive

You get one CSV file, exported from the app with one tap. Each row is a location fix with a timestamp in UTC, the coordinates, and the country and state they were in. The app records a new fix whenever the client moves more than a few kilometers, changes states, or every 30 minutes, whichever comes first.

date,latitude,longitude,country,state
2026-01-03T14:12:09Z,36.1699,-115.1398,US,NV
2026-01-03T22:40:51Z,36.1716,-115.1391,US,NV
2026-01-04T16:05:33Z,34.0522,-118.2437,US,CA
2026-01-06T09:18:02Z,36.1699,-115.1398,US,NV

From those rows the app also computes the day counts shown in the client’s app: a day is attributed to a state if the client was there at any point during it, which is the conservative reading most statutory-residency states use. If the client’s state uses a different rule (Utah counts the state where most of the day was spent, Ohio counts contact periods), the raw fixes let you apply it yourself.

Why it holds up

Contemporaneous. Fixes are recorded as they happen, in the background, not entered later. A record made at the time is worth more than one assembled for an audit.
Continuous. If tracking stops, because location access was revoked or the phone was off for long enough, the client is notified immediately, so gaps are rare and explainable.
Neutral. The app records where the phone was. It has no idea which answer the client wants.
Private. Everything stays on the client’s phone until they choose to export. Nothing is stored on our servers.

It is corroborating evidence, not a substitute for the rest of the file. Pair it with the usual domicile facts: home, family, driver’s licence, voter registration, where the dog lives.

The rules, state by state

We keep a plain-English summary of every state’s day-count rule, with a link to the statute or revenue-department source, at getwhereabouts.com/residency. Useful for the client conversation about which line they need to stay under.

A note you can send clients

Paste this into your year-end letter or a client email. Edit freely.

If you split time between states this year, the single most useful thing you can do before we meet is have a day-by-day record of where you were. State auditors put the burden of proof on you, and reconstructing a year from credit card statements is slow and full of gaps.

I recommend Whereabouts, an iPhone app that logs which state you are in automatically and exports the whole year as a spreadsheet. Set it up once and forget it. Your location history stays on your phone; nothing is sent anywhere unless you export it.

https://getwhereabouts.com

Try it yourself

Install it on your own phone first.

Seven days free, then $39.99 a year. Track a few days, tap Export CSV in Settings, and open the file. If it does what you need, you will know exactly what to tell clients.

Get Whereabouts on the App Store

Questions, or a format you would rather receive? Email ben@unionst.com. Replies come from the person who built it.

Whereabouts helps people keep records. It is not tax or legal advice.