If you are managing state tax residency seriously, you have four practical options for tracking where you spent each day of the year:
- Southbound — Florida-focused, iOS, passive GPS, private by design
- Monaeo — Enterprise-leaning, multi-state, designed for tax professionals and their high-net-worth clients
- TaxBird — Consumer-friendly, cross-platform, multi-state, longstanding category presence
- A spreadsheet — Free, manual, and the option most people default to before they realize it doesn’t work
Each of these is the right answer for someone. Each is the wrong answer for someone else. This is a direct comparison — what each one is built for, what it costs, where it fits, and where the tradeoffs are.
This post is written by the team behind Southbound, so it is not pretending to be a neutral third party. We will tell you where we think Southbound wins and where the other options are genuinely a better fit. The goal is to help you pick correctly, not to convert every reader into a customer who shouldn’t be one.
What Each Tool Is Actually For
The four tools share a category but solve meaningfully different problems.
Southbound
Built specifically for Florida tax residency. The product is opinionated around one question: did I spend enough days in Florida this year to qualify under the 183-day rule? Every screen, every metric, and every feature is designed around that question.
The hero metric is the Departure Budget — a single number that tells you how many days you can still spend outside Florida and remain on track for 183+. The calendar shows Florida and non-Florida days with manual override capability. The export produces an audit-ready CSV. The model is single-state, single-purpose, deliberately scoped.
The app runs passively on iOS using significant-location-change tracking — the same low-power location system Apple uses for native services. No GPS battery drain. No manual check-ins. No daily reminders to log a day.
Data lives in the user’s personal iCloud account. There are no Southbound servers holding location history. The privacy model is that the company itself never sees where you have been.
Monaeo
Monaeo is the longest-established player in the category and is positioned as a professional-grade tool. It is widely used by tax attorneys, accountants, and family offices managing residency for high-net-worth clients across multiple states.
The product is multi-state from the ground up. You can configure residency rules for any state, set thresholds, and track days against multiple jurisdictions simultaneously. It supports both iOS and Android. It includes a CPA portal that allows tax professionals to see and verify client data.
The pricing reflects the positioning. Monaeo’s plans have historically ranged from a few hundred dollars per year up to over a thousand depending on the tier, with enterprise pricing for family offices and firms managing many clients at once. Monaeo is the choice when residency planning is being run by professionals, with the client as a participant rather than the driver.
TaxBird
TaxBird occupies the consumer-friendly end of the category. It is designed for individuals managing their own residency without necessarily having a CPA driving the process.
The product is multi-state and cross-platform (iOS and Android). It uses location services to track presence and provides per-state thresholds and progress indicators. Pricing is consumer-friendly, typically in the range of low tens of dollars per year, which makes it accessible to a much wider audience than Monaeo.
TaxBird has a long track record. It is the option that has historically served the broadest swath of self-directed individuals who needed something better than a spreadsheet but did not need or want a professional-grade tool.
Spreadsheet
Free. Manual. The default for most people before they realize the limitations.
A spreadsheet works only if you actually maintain it. The discipline of opening a spreadsheet each day and entering “Florida” or “not Florida” is one that essentially no one sustains over a full tax year. Reconstruction at the end of the year — or worse, at the start of an audit three years later — produces a record that is imprecise, internally inconsistent, and looks exactly like what it is: a retroactive story.
Spreadsheets also lack the corroborating evidence that GPS-based tools provide. A row that says “Florida, March 12” has no underlying data behind it. A GPS log that says “iOS detected significant location change to Naples, FL at 9:14 AM on March 12, 2026” does.
For audit defense, the spreadsheet is the weakest possible position. For people who are not at meaningful audit risk and just want a sense of their year, it works.
The Comparison Table
| Feature | Southbound | Monaeo | TaxBird | Spreadsheet |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Designed for | Florida residency (single-state) | Multi-state, pro-grade | Multi-state, consumer | Anything you want |
| Platforms | iOS only | iOS + Android + Web | iOS + Android | Any |
| Tracking method | Passive GPS (significant location change) | Passive GPS + manual | Passive GPS | Manual |
| Pricing | $249/yr (free during launch) | Several hundred to $1,000+/yr | ~$35–45/yr | Free |
| Hero metric | Departure Budget | Day count vs. multiple thresholds | Days remaining per state | Whatever you build |
| Data storage | User’s iCloud only | Vendor cloud | Vendor cloud | Wherever you save it |
| Privacy model | No vendor-side location data | Vendor holds data, accessed by CPA | Vendor holds data | Yours |
| Export | CSV (audit-ready) | Detailed reports for CPAs | CSV / PDF | Whatever you build |
| CPA collaboration | Not built in (yet) | Yes — core feature | Limited | Manual |
| Audit-grade evidence | Strong (GPS + timestamps) | Strong (GPS + timestamps) | Strong (GPS + timestamps) | Weak |
| Maintenance effort | None after install | None after install | None after install | High |
Where Southbound Wins
There are three places where Southbound is genuinely the right answer, and we want to be specific about them.
You are focused on Florida and only Florida. If your tax planning is about establishing or maintaining Florida residency under the 183-day rule, and you have no parallel residency planning in another state, a Florida-specific tool is sharper than a multi-state generalist. The Departure Budget metric only makes sense in a single-state context. The interface, the language, and the workflow are all tuned to the question you are actually asking.
Privacy matters to you. The Southbound model is that we do not see your location history. Ever. It is in your iCloud, encrypted under your Apple ID, and we have no server-side copy. For a population that includes many people who are intensely private about their movements and travel patterns, that model is meaningfully different from “the vendor holds your location data on their servers and you trust their security and data handling.” Both models can be safe; only one of them removes us as a potential point of failure.
You are an iPhone user and you want passive operation. Southbound is iOS-only by design. We are not pretending to serve the Android market well, because we don’t. If you live on iPhone, the integration is deeper, the battery impact is essentially zero, and there is nothing to maintain after install.
Where Monaeo Is the Right Answer
If your residency planning is being run by your accountant or your family office, and you want the professional to have direct visibility into your day data, Monaeo is the right tool. The CPA collaboration features are real and they are the core of the product. The multi-state capability is genuine and well-developed.
For taxpayers with parallel residency considerations in multiple states — say, an executive who is establishing Florida residency but also has a significant presence in Texas, or a family splitting time across Florida, New York, and a third state — Monaeo’s model handles the complexity in a way a Florida-only tool cannot.
The price reflects the customer it is built for. Monaeo is not the value-tier choice; it is the professional-tier choice. If your accountant is recommending Monaeo, they are probably right.
Where TaxBird Is the Right Answer
If you are managing your own residency tracking without a CPA driving the process, and you need a tool that works on both iPhone and Android, TaxBird has been the standard answer in this category for a long time, for good reason.
It is affordable. It is multi-state. It works on both platforms. It does not require you to engage a tax professional to use it. For a substantial portion of the residency-tracking market — particularly people who are tracking days across two or three states and who want a tool that just works without specialized scoping — TaxBird remains a sensible choice.
If you are an Android user, TaxBird is the right answer between TaxBird and Southbound by default, because Southbound does not run on Android.
Where the Spreadsheet Is the Right Answer
A spreadsheet is the right answer if your residency situation is low-stakes — you are not at meaningful audit risk, you are not under scrutiny from a high-tax origin state, and your day count is comfortably above the threshold with significant margin. In that case, a back-of-envelope record is fine because you are not building it for adversarial review.
A spreadsheet is the wrong answer if you are at any real audit risk and have meaningful tax savings at stake. The cost gap between a $40 app and a free spreadsheet is trivial compared to the cost of producing reconstructed evidence in front of a New York or California auditor.
The Honest Tradeoffs
A few things we want to be direct about, because no comparison post is complete without the soft spots.
Southbound is iOS-only. If you live on Android, this is not your app. We will not pretend the experience would be the same on Android — it would not — and we have not built it.
Southbound is single-state. If your residency planning involves day-counting in multiple states with different thresholds, Southbound’s Florida focus is a limitation, not a feature. Monaeo is meaningfully better at multi-state.
Southbound has no CPA portal yet. If your accountant wants direct visibility into your day data, you would need to manually share an exported CSV. Monaeo is built around CPA collaboration; we are not, at least not yet.
Southbound is new. Monaeo has been in the category for over a decade. TaxBird has years of presence. Southbound launched on the App Store in April 2026. We think the product is sharp and the privacy model is right, but we are not pretending to have the institutional history that the older products do.
Southbound is priced at the higher end of the consumer tier. At $249/year (after the launch free period ends), Southbound is meaningfully more expensive than TaxBird and meaningfully less expensive than Monaeo. The positioning is “premium consumer, not enterprise” — which we think is the right segment for high-net-worth Florida residency tracking, but it is a higher price point than the cheapest option in the category.
Picking, In One Paragraph
If you are an iPhone user, your tax planning is focused on Florida, and privacy is something you actually care about — Southbound is the right tool. If your accountant is driving residency planning and wants direct visibility, or your situation spans multiple states with different thresholds — Monaeo. If you want a budget-friendly, cross-platform tool and your situation is straightforward — TaxBird. If your residency is low-stakes and you have significant margin above the threshold — a spreadsheet is genuinely fine.
There is no universally best tool. There is a right tool for your situation, and we think being honest about which one that is matters more than any individual pitch.
Where Southbound Fits
If after reading all of that, you have decided Southbound is the right tool for you — meaning iPhone, Florida-focused, audit-grade evidence, privacy-first — the app is on the App Store now. It is free during the early-adopter launch period.
The setup takes a few minutes. Grant “Always” location permission, complete the brief onboarding, and the app starts building your day record passively in the background. There are no daily tasks. There is no maintenance. By the end of the year, you have a clean, GPS-verified record of every Florida day and non-Florida day, exportable as a CSV for your accountant or for an audit response.
If Southbound is not the right tool for your situation, the recommendation we would make is to pick one of the alternatives above and start tracking immediately — not in January, not after your move, today. The biggest single mistake in residency tracking is starting late. The second biggest is starting and then not maintaining the record. The right tool is the one you will actually use for the full year, not the one with the most features on its homepage.
The day count is the load-bearing fact in almost every state tax residency case. Building it well is the cheapest insurance you can buy against an audit that hasn’t arrived yet.
This post is for general informational purposes only and does not constitute tax or legal advice. Mention of other products is based on publicly available information about those products and is not a representation by their respective companies. Work with a qualified tax attorney and CPA for advice specific to your residency situation.
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Published May 13, 2026