Having been a registrar for over 15 years with two different schools, I had a pretty clear picture of how good record-keeping should look. So when I started homeschooling my own kids, I searched for one hub to keep everything clean and in one location - grades, evaluations, attendance, transcripts, compliance...all of it. But it didn't exist.
The Sunday-night system
My homeschool record-keeping system, for years, was multiple spreadsheets, a paper planner, and a Google Drive folder I avoided opening every Sunday night. There was a grades sheet (which I'd update in batches whenever motivated by guilt). There was a “books read” sheet that lived in a different folder for reasons I no longer remember. There was a ClassWallet receipts dump that was technically organized but functionally a panic in waiting. And then there was the paper planner — the only thing I actually used daily, that nobody else in my household could read.
It worked. Sort of. Until it didn't.
I vented to my older brother one day about the problem with scattered record keeping for homeschooling, and the struggle of managing excel spreadsheets. He simply said “We can build something better.”
Things I had already tried.
I had previously tried Homeschool Tracker (the desktop one, then the online one). I tried Homeschool Helper. I tried Trello with a custom template a friend swore by. I tried PDFs and templates I found online. I tried a curriculum-bundled tool that came free with one of our subscriptions. I tried setting up a fresh Google Sheet from a YouTube tutorial that promised to be “the one.”
They all had the same problem. They were built for people who'd never sat at a kitchen table at nine at night, three days behind on the reading log, trying to remember which day last week was the lab and which day was the museum.
The grading systems assumed a school's frame of reference. The portfolio uploads assumed I had time to label every photo. The “compliance” features were templates from a single state, usually not mine. None of them touched ESA. None of them understood that the curriculum I use (TGTB and Masterbooks, with Apologia for science and IEW for writing) isn't an edge case — it's the mainstream of how Christian homeschool families actually teach.
That's why I built ArborSlate.
I asked my brother — who builds software for a living — to help me build the thing I wished existed. What it is, specifically: a single home base for homeschool records. Grades, attendance, reading logs, portfolios, state compliance, ESA receipts, transcripts and report cards when you need them. Plus — if you'd like, an AI tutor that is tailored to respect your family's values without overriding them.
Who it's for: homeschool families who want to keep homeschooling and stop fighting their tools to do it. Whether you're Bible-based or family-safe secular. Whether you're classical, Charlotte Mason, eclectic, Montessori, unschooling, or somewhere in between. Whether you're in a state that wants quarterly reports or one that just wants you to fill out an affidavit once and never look back.
What I want this to become
My desire is for ArborSlate to be the tool that respects your time. I want Sunday-night planning to take fifteen minutes, not three hours. I want you to log a grade in the car after co-op. I want your ESA quarterly report to assemble itself. I want your evaluator to open your portfolio and find every piece of work, every date, every reflection, already there.
I want this to be the tool that respects your family. The worldview presets aren't a marketing checkbox — they're the foundation of how the AI tutor talks to your kids, and they default to yourfamily's values, not the AI's. You see every conversation. You can pause anything you don't like. Your records are yours and you can take them with you whenever you want. Regular AI chats are ungated and unchecked. We don't allow our kids to access those. But ArborSlate's AI tutor is trained specifically for education - more specifically for your curriculum, with hard rules and architecture tightly scoped for that function alone.
And I want this to be the tool that makes the boring parts of homeschooling smaller so the good parts of homeschooling can be bigger.
ArborSlate was designed to solve my own problems as a homeschool mom. I graduated 3 daughters in the last 4 years, and struggled with all the things I mentioned above. Now I'm teaching my 9-year-old twins, and got to a place where I just could not see myself struggling through 8 more years of juggling different tools for different tasks. So ArborSlate was created to give me a single hub, and my hope is it can do the same for you.
An honest note
I know homeschool families have heard a lot of promises from a lot of tools. I've been on the receiving end of those promises. So I'll keep mine short.
I've built this carefully. I won't sell your data, ever. I won't push your kids toward an ideology they didn't sign up for. I'll keep prices honest and your data exportable. And when I miss something or get something wrong — because I might — I'll listen, because the people using this tool are my actual community, not a target market.
If you've been keeping your homeschool records the hard way, I'd love to have you try ArborSlate. You can access it for two weeks totally free. If you love it and sign up, but outgrow it, you can cancel anytime, and export all your data - it is yours to keep. ArborSlate was built by someone who's been right where you are, so I believe it will help optimize the boring parts so you can maximize the joyful parts of homeschooling.