Somewhere in the back of every home daycare provider’s mind is the licensing visit. Not because anything is wrong, but because the question “can I show you your attendance records for March?” is very different depending on whether the answer lives in a labeled export or in a stack of paper sheets in a kitchen drawer.

Paper records are honest work, but they are fragile. Sheets get coffee on them. A month goes missing. A correction is a scribble and an initial, and nobody remembers why the time was crossed out. When a licensor, an agency, or a parent asks for a specific child’s records for a specific period, the search itself becomes the stressful part.

One thing to be clear about up front: no software makes your daycare pass an inspection, and CubbyBook does not claim to. What it does is compliance-friendly recordkeeping: it helps organize the records commonly requested during licensing visits, keeps them in a form you can retrieve in minutes, and preserves a visible trail when something is corrected. Whether your records satisfy your local requirements is between you and your licensing body. Making them easy to produce is the part software can genuinely solve.

What this costs you today

If your records live on paper or in scattered files, the cost shows up in three places:

The scramble. A records request means an evening (or several) of digging, sorting, and photocopying, usually on short notice, usually while you are still running the daycare all day.
The gaps. Paper attendance depends on remembering to fill it in during the busiest moments of the day. A missed morning becomes a blank cell you have to explain months later.
The corrections problem. Crossed-out times and overwritten statuses look worse than they are. Without a note of who changed what and why, an innocent fix reads as an inconsistency.
The single copy. One binder is one point of failure. There is no backup of a paper sheet unless you make one.

The evenings you lose are real, but the bigger cost is the low-grade anxiety: not knowing, at any given moment, whether you could produce clean records for the last three months if someone asked tomorrow.

How you solve it in CubbyBook

1. Let attendance build the daily record

The foundation is the attendance system, and its most important property is one you never have to think about: every child gets exactly one immutable attendance record per day. Each record carries one of seven statuses (Expected, Checked in, Checked out, Absent, Sick, Vacation, or Statutory holiday), with timestamps recorded automatically and daily hours calculated for you.

You do the same thing you would do on paper (mark who arrived, when, and when they left), but the record-quality problems disappear on their own. No blank cells from a forgotten sheet, no math errors in the hours column, no ambiguity about when a status was set.

📸 Screenshot: the weekly attendance grid

2. Correct mistakes without erasing anything

Mistakes happen: a tap on the wrong child, yesterday’s absence marked today. On paper, the fix is a cross-out. In CubbyBook, the fix is a correction that keeps everything.

Open the day you need to fix and choose Correct attendance. The correction panel shows you both sides before you commit: “Currently recorded” next to “Will be recorded as,” so you can see exactly what the change will do. Pick a reason from the list (accidental tap, wrong child, wrong day, wrong status, wrong time, or other) and choose Apply correction.

Here is what makes this different from a cross-out: nothing is deleted. The original value, who made the correction, when they made it, and the reason are all preserved. Records are never removed. They are corrected on top, with the history intact.

📸 Screenshot: the Correct attendance panel showing “Currently recorded” and “Will be recorded as”

3. Review correction history before a visit

On any day that has been corrected, Correction history expands to show the full trail: the original entry, the corrected entry, the author, the timestamp, and the reason. Corrected days are flagged everywhere they appear, in the app and in exports, so a correction is never disguised as an original entry.

This is the part that turns corrections from a liability into an asset. Instead of a scribble that invites questions, you have a record that answers them: this was entered as Absent at 9:02, corrected to Sick at 9:40 by you, reason “wrong status.” That is what a trustworthy record of a fixed mistake looks like.

📸 Screenshot: an expanded Correction history on a corrected day

4. Export attendance for the date range requested (Pro)

When someone asks for records, you produce them from the Export button on the Attendance screen. Choose a date range and a format:

CSV for up to 365 days at a time, a full year in one file.
PDF for up to 62 days at a time, a formatted document for roughly two months per file.

Files are named so you can find them again later, like cubbybook-attendance-2026-01-01-to-2026-03-31.csv. The CSV has 19 columns covering the date, child’s name and date of birth, status, check-in and check-out times, total hours, who performed each check-in and check-out, the correction fields, and the timezone. It is UTF-8 encoded, so accented names render correctly in Excel, and all times are in 24-hour format in your daycare’s timezone. No ambiguity about 7:00 in the morning versus evening.

Exports are a Pro feature; the records themselves accumulate on any plan, so nothing is lost while you are on the free plan. Pro is what lets you get them out as files.

📸 Screenshot: the Export dialog with date range and CSV/PDF options

5. Gather signed incident PDFs and daily-log references

Attendance is usually the headline request, but incidents come up too. Every incident report that has been signed by a parent exists as a downloadable PDF titled “Accident / Incident Report,” carrying the educator’s and parent’s signatures with timestamps. (The full filing-and-signing flow is covered in our incident report guide.)

Each filed incident also writes an Incident Reference entry into the child’s daily log automatically, so the daily record and the incident report cross-reference each other. You can move from “what happened that day” to the signed report without searching.

If you need a per-child summary rather than raw daily records, a separate attendance report summarizes a date range for each child. Viewing it is free; downloading it as a PDF is Pro.

What changes

The practical change is that “can you show me your records?” becomes a five-minute task instead of a lost weekend. You pick a date range, export, and hand over files with consistent columns, automatic timestamps, and every correction flagged and explained. The deeper change is the background anxiety going away: the records are being built correctly every day as a side effect of taking attendance, and they are retained for three years, not dependent on a binder surviving.

A few honest caveats:

Tip: The record is only as complete as your habit. CubbyBook timestamps and calculates automatically, but it cannot check in a child you never marked. Making attendance a fixed part of your arrival routine is still the load-bearing habit.

Tip: Corrected days are flagged in exports too. That is a feature (it is what makes the record trustworthy), but it means corrections are visible, not cosmetic. Take the extra three seconds to pick the accurate reason.

Tip: PDF exports cap at 62 days per file. If you are asked for six months as PDF, plan on producing a few files, or use the CSV, which covers up to 365 days in one.

Tip: Organized records support documentation; they do not substitute for knowing your local requirements. Keep your licensing body’s actual checklist as the source of truth for what to keep. CubbyBook handles the how.

Common questions

Can I delete an attendance record that was entered by mistake?

No. Records are never deleted. You correct them instead: Correct attendance, pick a reason, Apply correction. The original value stays in the Correction history along with who corrected it, when, and why. For recordkeeping, that is exactly what you want: a mistake with a visible fix is far stronger than a record that quietly changed.

What exactly is in the attendance CSV?

Nineteen columns: the date, child name, date of birth, status, check-in and check-out times, total hours, who checked the child in and out, the correction fields, and the timezone. Times are 24-hour in your daycare’s timezone, and the file is UTF-8 so names with accents display properly in Excel.

How long are records kept?

Attendance records are retained for three years. Day to day you will mostly look at recent weeks, but the history is there when a longer range is requested.

Does using CubbyBook mean I’ll pass my licensing visit?

No, and be wary of any software that implies otherwise. Licensing outcomes depend on your program and your local rules. What CubbyBook does is keep the records commonly requested during licensing visits (attendance with timestamps, correction trails, signed incident reports) organized and exportable, so producing them is the easy part of the visit.

If the records question has been sitting in the back of your mind, see how the pieces fit together on the licensing visit records page. Start free. No card needed. Free forever plan; 14-day Pro trial included.

How to Organize Home Daycare Records for a Licensing Visit