NapLog Book a walkthrough
The author

Jimenez Julien, who writes and maintains NapLog

One person is responsible for what this product does, what this site claims and what happens when you send a message through it. That person is named here, with a working email address.

Why a childcare log, of all things

I did not set out to write software for daycare. I ended up here because of a spiral notebook on a kitchen counter in Reading, Pennsylvania. A provider I know had been running a licensed home program for eleven years, six children a day, and every evening she copied that notebook onto six paper sheets so parents would know how the day had gone. She was fast at it. It still took her most of an hour, and it happened after her own children had gone to bed.

What struck me was that none of the work was hard. It was transcription. The information already existed, written down by the person who saw it happen, at the moment it happened. It was just trapped in a format that could not be sent, counted or filed. That gap between a note on a shelf and a record a licensor will accept is the whole reason NapLog exists.

So I spent the next four years going to see how the record actually gets made. I sat in front rooms in Pennsylvania, Arizona and North Carolina, and in three room centers in Maine and Ohio. I watched providers log naps with one thumb while holding a bottle in the other hand. I watched a director rebuild an incident report at nine at night because the teacher who saw it had gone home at four. I read the licensing forms for a dozen states side by side and learned that they ask for almost the same information in almost incompatible layouts.

Everything in NapLog comes from those visits. Buttons are thumb sized because caregivers are never using two hands. Nap logging works for a whole room at once because six mats go down at the same time, not one at a time. The allergy prompt exists because a provider in Charlotte told me the thing she loses sleep over is not licensing, it is snack. The incident form asks for the witness first because that is the field people forget when they write it from memory hours later.

Experience and expertise

I have been building and shipping web products for over a decade, working alone and in small teams, mostly on tools for operators who never wanted software in the first place. My background is product and engineering rather than early childhood education, which is exactly why I do not design anything from a desk. Every screen in NapLog has been sat in front of by a licensed provider before it went out, and several of them have been thrown away after ten minutes because they did not survive a real morning.

The specific expertise I have built here is narrow and practical: what a state licensing specialist looks for in an attendance record, how ratio rules differ between a mixed age home and an age banded classroom, what parents actually read on a phone at 5:15 in the afternoon, and how much friction a caregiver will accept before she quietly goes back to the clipboard. That last number is smaller than most software people believe. It is roughly two seconds.

I run this under MLJ, SASU, a French company I own, and I publish every product in the network under the same name so there is one accountable party rather than a shell.

How this product is built and maintained

NapLog is worked on continuously and shipped in small pieces. Feature requests are read personally and answered personally, including the ones I turn down. When a provider tells me a screen is wrong, the fix goes out in days rather than quarters, because there is no committee between the report and the change.

The editorial standard for this site is simple. Every number on it comes from our own product data or from a timing study we ran with 62 participating programs in the fall of 2025, and if I cannot point at where a figure comes from, it does not go on the page. Testimonials are from named providers at named programs who agreed to be quoted and who reviewed their quote before publication. Pricing on this page is the price you pay, and there is no hidden per child fee waiting behind a sales call.

On the product side, records live on encrypted servers in the United States. We do not sell data, we do not place advertising trackers, and we do not use children's information for anything other than serving the program that entered it. Exports belong to you in open formats, so leaving NapLog is always possible without asking permission.

I am accountable for all of it: the accuracy of the claims on this site, the availability of the service, the security of the records inside it and the answer you get when you write in. If something here is wrong, tell me and I will correct it and say what changed.

Published articles

I also write The Daily Sheet, the magazine attached to this site, where the licensing rules, the food program paperwork and the arithmetic of a full room get the long form treatment they never get in a help center article.

Contact the author

The fastest way to reach me about a program, a licensing question or a correction to this page is email: jimenezjulien42@gmail.com. I read everything myself and reply within one business day. If you would rather see the product move first, book a walkthrough and bring one real day from your paper log.

Publisher: MLJ, SASU. Publication director: Jimenez Julien. Full company details are on the legal notice.