Frequently Asked Questions About QMD insight^®

Who is QMD Accountworks, LLC?

We're a small software company spun off from JDI Solutions Inc. to market software originally developed to run their business. We make tools that allow you to ask and answer questions that were never before possible, and help to you to finally understand what's really happening inside your company.

What is insight?

insight is a web-based environment suitable for running most small to medium sized businesses. It adapts to any business that does not use a specialized core application (like a reservations system for example). It runs technical service businesses and building contractors with the same ease and functionality. Your only requirement is a standards compliant web browser like Safari or Firefox.

Does this system really work?

The insight^® application began running job scheduling for JDI Solutions in 1996 as an application called SDS (Service Dispatching System). We rebuilt several times from 1997-2000 to run on various systems before settling on open source tools in 1999. In 2000, it was greatly expanded to run our parts sales operations. For the next few years, we kept enhancing it for our own use, but did not release it to the public. In 2006, we realized we had been running Quickbooks for too long and began building the replacement for it that became the insight environment in January 2007. Since then, JDIS has been running the entire operation on insight. We only use a separate client for inbound E-mail and Microsoft Word when we want to draw up a contract.

How sure are we that insight works? We base the financial strategies of a $2.5M/year company on the information we get from it.

You can also ask us for customer references. We have a number of clients running both the professional and enterprise clients who have dropped their Quickbooks installations very shortly after beginning to use insight.

How do we transition to running insight?

The hardest part of changing to a new system is getting started. To ease this, we do most of the setup for you so you can begin working immediately. We will conduct an interview with your administrative and IT people and then configure your installation for you. You have to make two decisions at the initial stage: (1) whether you will run your existing accounting in parallel for some time (we recommend 1-2 months so things keep flowing while you transition to the new system), and (2) how much archival data you want to put into insight.

We can load your client lists and contact information into insight for you in the initial setup phase. We'll also set up all of your users and privileges according to your instructions. Your basic accounting setup will be in place and ready to use on day 1. What we can't do is upload your existing accounting data. The reason is that this system has a unique internal structure and your data needs to come into it via the insight application so the relationships between different data items (which are the whole reason for running this platform) are created. This really isn't much different from any other change of accounting systems, and it's the only hard part of the transition.

Our recommendation is to pick a date for the beginning of the insight data and only load in transactions that happened after that date. Of course, we will help with this loading process if you like. We want this to work for you and we know that once you get started with insight, the only question you will have is why it took so long to find us.

What's your mission?

We're here to change the state of Enterprise Management software for small to medium sized firms. Our goal is to create software that allows people to run their business, not their software. Our plan is to scale our customer base up slowly so our customer support resources do not suffer and our quality remains constant. We're not opposed to having a lot of clients, but it's more important to have a lot of satisfied clients. We're not going to "sell out". We're not going to go away. To do either would defeat the purpose for doing this altogether. We were not happy with the state of business management software. This is how we are doing something about it.

Where is my data kept?

insight data is kept on our primary servers and backed up every hour to offline storage on the opposite coast of America. We keep 24 hours of warm backups at all time.

What if I ever decide to stop running insight?

We will maintain your data for the lifetime of the company and you will always have access to it - even if you suspend your account. What happens is inactive accounts can view, but not modify data.

How do you handle confidentiality matters?

We are happy to sign a notarized non-disclosure agreement with you on request. We can't read your data directly without an account within your company, and there's no way for us to see/know your username and password, so the only way we can interact with your information is on your specific request and with your specific permission.

How does my financial professional get involved?

All insight_professional and insight_enterprise clients can request an account for their CPA at no additional cost. Your CPA can interact with your QMD data from their office - correcting accounting, auditing transactions, and offering real-time financial guidance. We also offer bookkeeper accounts at a reduced price. Contact us for details.