A nanny daily report template you will actually use (free, printable)

This is the sheet to hand a new nanny on her first morning. It fits on one page, it needs a pen and nothing else, and every line on it is there because a parent asked about it at the door.

Print the one-page sheet (plain text)

The plain-text sheet has a space to write on every line. Open it and use your browser's print command, or keep it on your phone.

Carelio keeps this record for you as the day happens, free for nannies. Get the iPhone app

The nanny daily report template

The table below is a preview of the same lines, so you can see what goes where before you print.

At the end of the shift, hand the sheet over at the door or leave it where the family will see it first, and keep a photo of it for yourself. The handover takes ten seconds, and the conversation at the door can be about the child instead of the list.

Why a sheet at all

At the end of the day there are about thirty seconds at the door. A parent has one arm out of a coat, the child is reaching up, and someone asks how the day was. You have just done eight good hours, and you have to answer in one word. By bedtime that word is a text that says "good day", and the nap, the bottle and the thing at the park are gone. A nanny daily report template fixes that. It is not only for the family. It is your record of the care you gave, written down while it was still true.

The seven lines that matter

The sheet has more than seven lines, but seven of them do most of the work. If you only ever fill in these, the report is already better than the text message it replaces.

Sleep, per nap, with times down and up. Write two times for every nap, not "napped well". A parent who knows the nap ended at 2:05 knows why bedtime went sideways at seven. Two numbers do more than any adjective, and they are the first thing a parent looks for.

Food offered and food eaten. These are different lines, and the gap between them is the useful part. "Lunch" tells a parent nothing. "Pasta and peas, ate most of the pasta and none of the peas" tells them what dinner needs to be. Bottles get an amount in ounces, every time.

Diapers or potty, the count and anything unusual. The count records the ordinary. The unusual part is what a parent needs: a rash starting, a long dry stretch, the first time they asked for the potty on their own.

What you actually did. The specific thing. Not "played", but the park with the red slide, the blue cup they finally drank from, the song about the bus that worked when nothing else did. This is the line parents reread on the train the next morning, and it is the line that shows the work you do.

Mood, in one honest line. Hard days included. "Clingy for twenty minutes after the nap, fine after the bottle" is kinder to everyone than "great day" on a day that was not. A parent who reads honest lines on the hard days learns to believe the good ones.

Anything they should hear from you first. The bumped knee, the scratch from another toddler at the park, the medicine that got refused. If it will come up later from someone else, it goes on the sheet now, in your words, with the time.

Your hours, start and end. It is the line nobody reads until the week there is a question about it, and then it is the only line that matters. Write it every day, including the days you stayed late without being asked.

A filled example for one ordinary Tuesday

Here is the sheet filled in for one quiet day. Maya is fourteen months old and her nanny is Nia. They are the sample family we use for examples; neither of them is real, and the day is the kind of day most days are.

Notice how little of it is prose. Most lines are a time and a few words. The mood line is the only one that needed a moment of thought, and it took ten seconds. The last line, two diapers left, is the one that saves someone a trip to the pharmacy at 9 pm.

Write it as the day happens, not at 5 pm

A daily report goes wrong in one predictable way. It gets written at the end, from memory, while the child is falling apart and a parent is due in ten minutes. That version is shorter than the day was, every time, and vaguer.

The fix is a habit we think of as two taps on paper. When something happens, write the time and one word. 12:15, down. 2:05, up. 2:30, 6 oz. That is all it takes in the moment, and you can do it with a child on your hip.

Memory drops the numbers first. By late afternoon you will remember that there was a nap and a bottle. You will not remember whether the nap was forty minutes or ninety, or whether the bottle was four ounces or six. The words come back easily at the end of the day. The numbers never do.

So the sentences can wait. Before the parent arrives, turn each time and word into a line, add the mood and the one moment worth telling, and the sheet is done in three minutes. The numbers were recorded when they happened, rather than reconstructed at the door.

Keep the sheet somewhere you pass all day: on the counter by the kettle, clipped to the fridge, folded in the diaper bag on park days. A report that lives in a drawer gets written at 5 pm.

When the day was hard

Hard days are when the habit pays for itself. If the child cried for an hour, refused lunch and napped for twenty minutes, the sheet still gets the times and the amounts, and the mood line says so plainly. Parents do not need a hard day softened. They need to know what happened, in order, so the evening makes sense and the next morning can start differently. Write it the same way you write a good day: times, a few words, and one line of your own at the end.

That one habit is the whole method. The template only gives it somewhere to live.

What a quiet day says

Some days nothing happens, and the report still matters. Write "no incidents recorded", never "everything went smoothly". The first says only what it can: you did not write down an incident that day. The second is a verdict about the whole day, and parents can hear the difference. A parent who reads plain, recorded lines on an ordinary Tuesday learns to trust the sheet on the day it counts. And if something does worry you, it does not wait for the sheet: call the parent when it happens.

Quiet days are most days. Writing them down properly is how a family learns what normal looks like for their child, and how both of you notice when something changes.

What never goes on it

The report is about the child's day, so some things stay off it. Judgments of the parents, even gentle ones. Details about other families you work for or meet at the park. Anything you would not be comfortable hearing read aloud at the door with the child listening. And medical language you would not use out loud: write "warm to the touch at 3:10, drank well, called the family", not a diagnosis. If something worries you, call the parent. The sheet is where you write down that you did.

Keep your own copy

When a job ends, most nannies walk away with nothing to show for it. No record of the naps, the first steps, the months of ordinary good days that added up to real work. Keep a copy of every sheet: a photo of the page, or the text file on your phone.

Ask the family first, and keep anything that names the child private. What you are keeping is a record of your own work, the hours and the care, and it is yours. We are writing a longer piece on how to document your experience as a nanny, and it will be linked from this page when it is ready.

If you want to see the version we built into an app, here is how Carelio works for nannies.

The best report is the one that actually gets written, so start with the sheet and one day. By Friday it will take three minutes, and the thirty seconds at the door will finally have something in them.

If this helped, send it to someone who does the same work.