No two lists are the same
It asks first. Then it builds your list.
Before Boris shows you anything, it asks a few questions. Your status. Your branch. Whether a spouse is coming, whether you have kids, whether you are bringing a pet, whether you will have a car. Then it builds your list out of the answers.
So you are not scrolling past things that are not yours. Bringing a dog? You get the chip-before-shot order, the three-week wait after it, the ten days you have to get the paperwork stamped before you fly, and a warning that Germany turns some breeds away at the border no matter what your orders say. No pet, and none of that appears. Kids? You get school sign-up, and a nudge to check the school bus radius before you sign a lease, because a house one street too far means you drive them yourself every morning for a year. No kids, and it is not there. No car? You get how to live here without one, instead of a list about shipping yours, taking the driving test, the fuel card and German insurance.
Coming on your own works the same way. No spouse means nothing about getting a spouse over here and nothing about family housing. It is not greyed out. It is simply not on your list.
Your status changes just as much. Active duty, GS civilian, contractor and NAF do not get the same money, the same healthcare, the same lodging, or the same paperwork on the way out. Boris keeps all four apart.
- AD
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Active duty
Your health cover, base legal help, and the offices to go to in the order you need them, not alphabetically. If your spouse or kids fly in later on their own orders, Boris runs that as its own list.
- GS
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DoD GS civilian
The money for your rent and the money for your hotel while you house-hunt both have deadlines that start the day you land, and Boris counts them down. Your health cover is the federal employee plan, not the military one. You still take the base driving test like everyone else.
- CT
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Contractor
The paperwork that gives you your status here takes about ten weeks, so Boris starts you on it early. It also says plainly what you do not get: nobody pays your rent, nobody pays you to move, and legal questions go to your company, not to base legal. You do get to drive on a base licence, and you skip registering your address at the German town hall.
- NAF
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NAF employee
Your appointment letter decides everything, and Boris says that before anything else. Your health cover is the NAF plan, not the military one and not the federal employee one. If you were hired here as a spouse, most of the money other people get does not apply to you, and it is better to find that out now than at the finance office.
Read the full breakdown in what each status gets in Germany.
One app, three phases
PCS-In. Settled. PCS-Out.
You are in one of three. Boris shows you that one and hides the other two until you get there.
PCS-In
From the day orders drop to your first month here. Getting ready to fly, the trip, and everything with a deadline once you land.
Settled
Living here. Where to go, how to save money, who speaks English.
PCS-Out
Leaving. What to cancel, in what order, and the things people forget until it is too late.
Checklist, directory, warnings, map
What it does.
Here is what is in it. Nothing goes into any of it without a source I can point at.
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Checklist
Your list, from the day orders drop to the day you are settled. Tasks unlock when the one before them is done, so you are not chasing a form you cannot file yet. Every task says where the rule comes from.
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Verified directory
Doctors, mechanics, tax preparers and schools in the KMC where somebody speaks English. Every listing shows when it was last checked, and I check them again about every six months.
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Heads-up warnings
Some things everybody repeats are wrong, and a few of them cost money. That international driving permit you bought before you flew does not let you drive here, whatever the internet says. A GS civilian told that base legal does not help civilians should ask anyway, because the law names federal employees. And you cannot get out of a German lease by text or email. It has to be paper, signed, in the mail.
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Today and Map
What is due today, and a map of the places I have already checked.
See the sources behind the warnings above in the driving answer and the Anmeldung answer.
The honest limits
What Boris does not do.
Boris does not calculate your entitlements. Your finance office does that, and their number is the one that counts. And Boris covers the Kaiserslautern Military Community and nowhere else — if you are headed somewhere else, most of this will not help you.
No account, no email, no tracking
Nothing about you leaves your phone.
No account, no email, no login. Your status, your saved places, your checked-off tasks — all of it sits on your phone and nowhere else. That costs you something: there is no restoring your progress on a new phone, because there is no server holding it. Every network call Boris makes is listed on the privacy architecture page.
Who made it
A neighbor who does this for a living.
I have never done a PCS. I am not military, and I am not affiliated with the DoD. You should know that before you trust anything in here.
What I do have is four years of watching families land. My wife Irina and I run a temporary-lodging house in Landstuhl called Mumo’s Inn, so most families we meet are three days off the plane holding a folder nobody explained to them. Three years of those kitchen-table conversations became this app.
I moved to Germany myself, too. Different rules, same feeling — and I would have wanted something like this.
The day job is //KOCH., my boutique studio here in Landstuhl. Advertising first, back in South America. Then industrial visualization here in Europe — virtual-reality apps and touchscreens for trade shows, simulations that let a buyer run a machine before it has been built, on projects for industrial manufacturers, ZEISS, thyssenkrupp, ABB and Bizerba among them. The two turned out to be the same job: take something complicated and get a person to understand it in about a minute.
That is all Boris is.
Mumo’s Inn is in the app’s directory, marked as ours. You should hear that from me rather than find it. Full legal details are in the Impressum.
From the App Store
What families say after using it.
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“…Boris was with us every step of the way and made it feel manageable.”
MATrucc · July 2026
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“…I also love the ‘Settled’ version, which provides valuable information and guidance for people living in the area…”
JKordos · July 2026
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“…it helps organize all the tasks you need to do. Once here, it provides lots of helpful info for day to day living.”
PNWer 62 · July 2026
Quoted word for word from the App Store. I did not write a syllable of them.
All of this, in your pocket.
Free on the App Store and on Google Play. For deep dives, see the KMC guides; for quick, sourced answers, see Answers.