All documents in QDMS must be registered into the Master Drawing Register, (MDR for short). The MDR retains the latest revision of all documents. Previous revisions are archived to a document history automatically. Separating the latest revision from previous revisions, is a key feature of the QDMS design.

The mandatory attributes of a document in QDMS are: the Document Number, the Revision, the Status, and the Title. Other attributes can be made compulsory on request. Most users would also capture, the name of the Company the document is from, the Transmittal received number, if the document is external, the Date Received, the Discipline, and the document type. There are many other optional attributes in QDMS such as Zones, Packages, Categories, and WBS codes.

The spreadsheet style layout of the master document register is extremely popular with users, since they can see all their documents at once. This is a major advantage over the competition who have limited themselves by the windows folder paradigm leading to incorrect filing and difficulties in finding documents. The QDMS MDR layout is fully customisable on a per user basis.