This article explores how a template in documentation of preschool systematic quality development work acts to produce elements of quality. Assuming that documentation produces rather than represents preschool quality, and using a post-humanist agential realist perspective, the article shows how thematic work, care and education become elements of quality. But by turning care into a theme, education and care run the risk of being dichotomised, and care downplayed. The article concludes that when producing rather than looking back on and evaluating preschool quality, documentation has the potential to serve as a vantage point for preschool actors to discuss where they might be going and to think around qualities rather than quality.