How to track your tax-residency days (the easy way)
Spreadsheets fail at day-counting for tax residency because you stop updating them. How to track days per country reliably — automatically from your photos, with each country's threshold and fiscal year.
Short answer: the reliable way to track tax-residency days is to record, per country, how many days you've spent this tax year, compare each against that country's threshold and fiscal year, and watch for the lines — ideally automatically, so you actually keep it up. Flags: Tax Residency does this from the dates in your photos, on-device.
Why the spreadsheet always loses
Most people start with a spreadsheet: a row per trip, a formula for the total. It works for about a month. Then a trip goes unlogged, the fiscal years differ by country, the UK ties change your real limit — and the number you're trusting is quietly wrong. The failure mode isn't the maths; it's keeping it current.
What good day-tracking actually needs
- Every country, separately — including the ones you didn't plan to watch.
- The right window — each jurisdiction's own tax year (UK 6 Apr, Australia 1 Jul, most others calendar).
- Early warning — a nudge before you cross a threshold, not after.
- Beyond days — a flag when home/family/work ties could make you resident regardless of the count.
- A record you can hand an adviser.
How Flags does it
Flags reads each photo's date and coarse place-stamp offline, assigns the day to a country, and counts it against that country's threshold and fiscal year — across 237 countries and all 51 US states. It surfaces a colour-coded verdict (safe / close / over / Review), suggests a country to watch when your days there start to matter, handles the UK ties grid, flags US citizenship, and keeps this year plus the last five. No GPS, no account, nothing uploaded. Pro adds an advisor-ready PDF export.
Flags is an early-warning tracker, not tax advice. It deliberately doesn't model treaties, the US weighted substantial-presence formula, or the FEIE. Confirm your position with a qualified adviser.