We have saved quite a bit of time with Fishbowl compared to our previous software.

Fishbowl is simple to use. Everything is easy to find. Search features work well. All facets integrate well.

It’s been a bit of a struggle to integrate all aspects of our diverse business.

Easy to use, and thorough support documentation

Cost seems high for the program when compared to other services

It was easy to implement FB as we did not have many integration with other systems.

User-friendly interface and tons of training materials.

Reports customization. Cost of goods calculation.

From the start they have been upfront and honest and having played around with giving me a very high price at first and then lowering it down by 50% like other companies that I dealt with. It’s nice to have the upfront and honest conversations without failing like I’m getting a sales pitch from, a company that just wants to make the sale. Fish bowls, seals representatives. Their internal staff have been very professional from start and throughout the process so far.

All of the pertinent information that my staff can utilize to help them be better at helping our customers.

Setting up all of the information. Although they have spreadsheets that you can fill out, it still takes a little time to gather all the information to insert it into the system like any other company.

We have been very pleased with our Fishbowl experience.

Our implementation Specialist was absolutely incredible. When you has this level of customer support, implementing was a breeze. I don't know that we ever had a question that he could not answer.

There are some reporting barrier on canned reports that is a bit frustrating, but I am sure there are work arounds for those.

From jump, I found out that atleast 50% of what my salesperson told me was completely fabricated or at the very least, extremely misleading. Customer service is non-existent. Earlier today I spent 2 hours on hold waiting for someone from tech support to help me. I email my rep and he doesn't email me back. I call him, he doesn't answer and he doesn't return my call.

I liked the interface, the ease of use and how it synched flawlessly with Quickbooks.

This is so close to being halfway decent software but there are just so many odd little quirks that keep it from really being a powerful tool. Just one example - if you move a piece of inventory that you've had in your warehouse for 6 months from row 1 to row 2, the aged date resets to zero. This makes it effectively impossible for you to track your aged inventory. If you want to look up a part that you don't have in stock, you need to do an advanced search, check a box that you're looking for something not in inventory and then search for the product. If you're looking up 10 products in a row that aren't in stock, you need to repeat those steps each and every time.

The roll out period and training could be more structured.

Ease of use. Cost effective. Simple to train on.

The sell ware integration to Shopify. I used Fishbowl in the past and the direct back-end connection was beneficial, but no longer exists.

ease of use and fantastic customer support

better accounting visability prior to uploads and more options for FIFO, little bit touchy and tough to troubleshoot some problems without support but overall very efficient and worth the money

The technical support in particular [sensitive content hidden] were attentive and professional in resolving my issue.

The issue was with a Global shipping selection for Saturday Delivery. This box try's to dictate all of your shipments arrive on Saturday when checked.

Being able to see the Activity of each item.

Reporting is terrible. Trying to change pricing without having to export everything and then importing them all again.

Overall, the Fishbowl program is decent. It is capable of doing almost all of what they claim, but the day-to-day usability is clunky and unrefined. It is as if they only stay on the development/conceptual side of things and never test their product daily. If they were to address the issues that I outlined that relate to the user experience, I would more confidently feel that this product would be more worth its large price tag. Until then, It remains difficult to recommend this product to others.

I like that this program allows your company to do a lot, as long as you know how to do it. It has also helped our company create more rigidity and procedure (Whether we wanted to or not).

I do not like that we have paid over $30,000 for a program that has basic functionality issues. We experience issues with basic things like scanning products, typing in fields, synchronizing inventory with our online store, etc. Also, their kitting function is what we were originally sold on, but we have now completely stopped using the function because it has fundamental issues. They are not always detrimental, but the accumulation of these small issues results in a program that you wouldn't believe costs what it does. Quite unfortunate. Another common issue that we face is the program's habit of freezing constantly. From what I have learned from support, the program does this on purpose to protect the database from data loss, but what it results in is our Sales guys needing to restart our POS program CONSTANTLY. Literally, on almost every transaction, their "Checkout" program freezes and they need to force quit and reopen. Our purchaser has also often been in the middle of a large PO, and the program freezes, requiring a restart and loss of that whole PO. Speaking of the POS side, their "Checkout" program is not great at all. It experiences all of the aforementioned issues but is also just a program that feels like they don't work towards improving at all. On top of that, they don't even integrate with any other POS programs or companies that work for basic retail applications, so we currently don't have an alternative.

I have been using Fishbowl for several months now and I am very happy with the results. It's a comprehensive inventory management tool with a wide range of features and options. The user interface is intuitive and easy to use, and customer support is quick and helpful when needed. The pricing structure can be a bit complex, but overall, Fishbowl is an excellent choice for inventory management.

Fishbowl is an incredibly comprehensive inventory management tool. It has a wide range of features and options that make it easy to keep track of all the items in your inventory. The user interface is intuitive and easy to use, and the customer support is top-notch. I highly recommend Fishbowl for anyone looking for a reliable inventory management solution.

Fishbowl's pricing structure can be a bit confusing, and it can be hard to determine what the best option is for your particular situation. Additionally, the customer support could be improved, as there is sometimes a long wait time for help. Overall, though, Fishbowl is a great option for anyone looking for a reliable inventory management solution.

It meets our basic needs for manufacturing and sales.

The flow from the creation of a sales order to the fulfillment is flawed. If a customer pre-pays, we have to artificially fulfill the order, export it to QuickBooks, charge the customer through QuickBooks, then manually notify the fulfillment department to release the purchase order to UPS.

Integration with our accounting software. Able to save documents to the drive for later recall. Multiple users in the system without slow down. Get ship quotes while staying in the sales order. Able to email customer estimates from sales order.

Updates sometimes cause issues with the software and need to be addressed by customer service. Customer service is only open 8-6 mountain time. Our third party forms are easily broken when major updates are needed. This slows our processes down.

We run FB 2016.11 with QuickBooks Premier 2015. FB handles quoting, sales orders, your basic pick/pack/ship, purchase orders and inventory. It has BOM capability but we find this limited. The price was right for us, esp. compared to our previous Sage software. Prepare to spend 3 to 4x the cost of the software in customization, support and initial set-up. Find other companies doing what you do (or more importantly the way you do it) and see FB in action. The software continues to have limitations and I have continued reservations about that. Some previous reviews bring this up: one's requests aren't really acknowledged or their sort of pooh-poohed. That doesn't make for a good feeling. Despite all the frustrations, limitations, and problems, Fishbowl has helped us. We'd purchase it again. We're at a point where we are again growing, and I think FB can grow with us.

I read through all the reviews (at this time 126 of them) and agree with the many that indicate that support is very difficult to get a hold of. I also echo the complaints about the need for A LOT of custom reports for simple things. And the fact that the software has bugs and that you WILL be resetting your server to complete end-of-day export to Quickbooks. Maybe more often if you export more frequently. But it is getting BETTER with every release. Still, there is no "user accountability" (again, to echo another review) with SO, PO, etc. Nor is there accountability with inventory entry. You simply have very few opportunities to have documented the ways in which your users interact with Fishbowl. And this lack is serious and can have consequences for your business. Further: be prepared for the result of the lack of customer support: Fishbowl relies on a network of consultants. You've got to get a good one to help you with bugs, problems, fixes, custom reports. And that can be expensive. There's some good consultants and bad consultants. The best consultants I've worked with admit Fishbowl's shortcomings but see the *potential* I can understand the criticisms of FB's sales staff in previous reviews. But these have to be put into context. I guess it's like a lot of sales people who promise you things. But what I would add is the sales people at the beginning of the process are so attentive than when you arrive to the post-sale status, it's just a little jarring how non-attentive the customer support staff are. So that might be the source of that criticism. From what I understand, you've got a lot of sales people, very few support people, and a lot of earnest, hardworking (and overworked) developers and programmers. I think they want to do good work and make a good product. I could speculate why the difficulties are present here but I don't have a full enough understanding to say anything more useful beyond my initial impressions and conversations with Fishbowl people. Finally: speaking of *potential*, I really do think Fishbowl has been good us and has the potential to be even better. But the number one problem may be the corporate culture. And I think I'm being fair in my assessment here. For the culture is a circle-the-wagons mentality. And it lacks transparency. Sure, there are customers who express their frustrations, but one must put those frustrations and the way the users express them into *context*. I think to its own detriment, Fishbowl does not do this. I'm not sure if I were purchasing today (and without having had the experience with Fishbowl that I now do and seeing what I now see it can do for us) that I would purchase it. One small example: Fishbowl used to have a user support forum where users could interact and sometimes FB employees would participate. That forum allowed us to see ways in which people were using Fishbowl. Apparently, some people were badmouthing the company (sometimes rightly), so FB canned the forum. (I think you can still see a google cache of it). I can think of dozens of user support forums from big (Apple) to small (smaller software) where users proffer all sorts of opinions. This doesn't stop them from allowing the community a voice. Or from users helping one another and building a supporting (and supportive) community that can benefit users. But again, the corporate culture is such that transparency appears to have little value. Perhaps FB wants to "control their narrative" from a centralized place. Many of its users would, I'm sure, defend Fishbowl from silly or inane comments and yet let the substantive comments stand as beneficial. For example: case studies. It's important for the potential buyer to get a full view of what and how FB is serving a particular customer with particular needs. That can influence a purchasing decision. You're not going to get serious help with understanding whether FB is right for you with these with facile, superficial "case studies" not generated by real users themselves but rather downloaded from the company website. These types of things often lack substance. They are more marketing material and than informed aids for purchasing decisions. We were approached to participate in such a study and we said no. In that context, we didn't think it wasn't the right thing to do and it didn't feel like a good fit with our values.

Not a whole lot. Tracking the location of items: For us many items come and go in inventory; they go from the warehouse to staging, to deployment to return from deployment to RMA and back to inventory. We are currently looking at asset management programs rather than inventory management programs. This program probably works ok if you are stocking 20 of this and 10 of that and then using them in different work orders. For us this is not really working well at all.

It Freezes, which got blamed on it being on our server, we checked into it, it was on theirs. Some days reports don't run, this was blamed on our server space but we could not get a quick answer on how much we have and how much we used. If you put a picture (you can only put one) on the parts side you cannot see it on the inventory side - neither can you see any notes that are made on the parts side on the inventory side. You can switch from parts to inventory but not from inventory to parts. You cannot edit a title of an item in inventory, you have to go back to parts. You will end up using more and more space on the server because deleting an item or deleting a location is not possible. This is a program that probably was state of the art when we started using it but has not grown with the time. We tried using Fishbowl Go: not a fan. I can find an item using it but moving it works much better on the computer. You cannot search for an item by serial number of extension ID. I could go on but what is the point!

North Park is a 3rd Party Logistics and Contract Packaging business, specializing in light manufacturing, warehousing, and B2C shipping services. We provide each customer the service and attention only the 'big guys' get at other fulfillment houses. Our search for a new Inventory/Manufacturing software solution was prompted by our move away from a warehouse operation towards a 3rd party solution for small to medium-sized businesses, that are outgrowing their current warehousing capabilities. Prior to using Fishbowl Inventory, we used 'MS Dynamics AX' (think 'GP' on steroids). Our management team has had decades of experience using everything from BaAn and SAP to high-end custom systems, and even home-grown customized solutions. We chose Fishbowl Inventory primarily based on value, integration w/Quickbooks, and ease-of-use. We've been running for more than 3 years, currently running ver 13.2 Manufacturing, Salespoint and Mobile Warehouse. We highly recommend staying updated with the current version, as improvements and features are continually being added. Initial install and implementation took us less than a full day, including import of Customer, Item, BOM, etc. from QB. User training took a week or so for all our team to be up and running well enough to use it in live production. (Only one of us spent any time in the demo.) For the most part, Fishbowl is simple and intuitive to use. There are very few places or processes where the desired next step isn't obvious. However, we've found many useful tips & tricks that we benefit from greatly, and most would have been learned with onsite training, but we declined initially because of our extensive background with other systems. Customer support has been absolutely fantastic for us! We use the Live Chat option as first contact, and only rarely need to resort to phone calls. Despite the recorded phone tree that is standard today, Fishbowl's is about as short as it can be and still direct your call to the right group. Once there, it's always leave a message and wait for a call-back; but I've always gotten a call within 2 hours (usually less). For truly urgent needs, I've always been able to call back, get the operator and get in touch with Support that can at least identify the issue and suggest some troubleshooting I can do while awaiting Technical help. In 3 years we've only had 1 instance of down-time due to system failure and that was resolved and we were up and running in 2hrs. Biggest benefits of using Fishbowl for us are ease of implementation and use; power/reliability of the system; manufacturing capabilities (only shortcoming there is full MRP/CRP/ERP modules for planning, but for our size and complexity it does surpisingly well). The biggest shortfall of Fishbowl for us is Reporting. The nature of our business doesn't lend itself well to many of the standard informational reports (operational reports are fine). However, Fishbowl is ODBC compliant, their reporting platform is open source (similar to Crystal Reports, but a bit steeper learning curve), and if you're not comfortable with SQL there are several 3rd party options for customizing reports.

We've been successfully using Fishbowl now for at least five years and it's allowed our company to process orders and control our inventory to a point where everything runs smoothly between our manufacturing team and our front of house team. Fishbowl has helped turned our "mom and pop" business into a streamlined operation with customers all over the world.

I have used other CRM/inventory management applications over the years and Fishbowl is by far one of the most robust, all-in-one solutions for our business. It's ease of use, stability, and accessibility has helped run our business for the past several years in terms of POS operations, inventory control, and handling purchase orders.

My only complaints are that, under the customer tab, the SAVE and DELETE buttons are next to each other. Also under the customer tab, the check balance is next to the history button (which we have to utilize constantly throughout the day). If we accidentally hit CHECK BALANCE, the process runs and holds up Fishbowl for upwards towards a minute. Since this is not something that we utilize, is there a way to possibly disable that button?

The software overall is extremely outdated. I would not recommend this to anyone.

Inventory tracking is mediocre at best - A pro was required for the review.

Customer service is terrible. Once you sign up and pay thousands for their system, they virtually tell you to "figure it out yourself". Information from QuickBooks to Fishbowl does not properly transfer. The invoicing process is extremely cumbersome. There are a lot of unnecessary steps when invoicing and processing orders. To edit invoice lines is extremely difficult. You cannot edit invoices once they have been processed. Printing and formatting (two very simple things) have been overly difficult with this program. We have had to reach out to Fishbowl numerous times to have the system tailored to our needs.

Overall, I am satisfied with purchasing the Fishbowl software for manufacturing bill of materials and inventory management. Have only been using for approximately one year but so far it seems much easier to use compared to the previous software that we used. We have only used the out of the box software. All other software's we use always required special programing which was always a hassle and large expense.

The ease of set-up and use of the manufacturing process. Very intuitive and do not need to spend a lot of time training new people to use. Once we set up, new users can begin working with very little guidance.

The training was good, but for a startup additional training time would be good after we are up and running. After the initial training I only heard from someone when they wanted to sell me something additional. No follow-up calls, emails or communication to determine if there were any additional questions or concerns. With software I always felt that good prompt support is essential. I still have issues with the QB accounting integration, and I receive zero support from FB.

It provided a decent ERP for the price but is definitely geared to low transaction volumes.

Fishbowl is relatively easy to use (by nature, ERP systems are complex) and is relatively reliable for companies whose transactions number in the low hundreds per day. Their support is quite effective but may be slower than you like -- if your business is effectively down due to an ERP issue, the last thing you want to get when you call support is voicemail. Unless things have changed in recent (2017) releases, one must update the local client with each system update, and that can be problematic for small shops that do have centralized software management and have restricted local rights on their PCs. They did change from FireDB to MySQL late last year, which improved performance drastically, but the database still requires a lot of optimization, care and feeding in order to get peak performance. Eventually, the company I worked for decided that it had outgrown FBI and migrated to NetSuite.

* Slow support response * Relatively slow performance * Cannot cancel running batch jobs * They recommend(ed) running Quickbooks and Fishbowl on the same server, which meant an extremely expensive server was required. The alternative was to split the two apps onto different machines and experience super-slow batch updates (some ran hours)

I work for a full-service dental laboratory, which is a bit of a unique application for this software, and we have been using Fishbowl for about one year. Since our completed products are all custom made to patient specifications, we purchased Fishbowl primarily to organize and track internal inventory and consumption. We knew from the start that there would be no off-the-shelf solution for our situation, but we hoped that from what we had seen, we would be able to find enough work-arounds to get it doing close to what we needed. If anything, it has made the inventory management process even more arduous. While Fishbowl offers a lot of options, and will probably work very well for a more typical business, it is not a good solution for more complex situations. It simply doesn't have the flexibility. The only way to remove items from inventory is via cycle count (which leaves no record of consumption) or via sales order (which means that all of your Parts also need to be listed as Products, and you will need to do a lot of unnecessary paperwork just to maintain accurate consumption reports. The barcode scanners and label printer we ordered from Fishbowl are also antiquated devices, and we are unlikely to be able to repair them if anything goes wrong. What has been most disappointing about this system by far is the customer support. The live chat feature is their saving grace - the hours are very reasonable and the queue has generally been quite short. However, there seems to be a massive amount of turnover in the company - nearly every time I contact them, I end up talking to someone different, and have to re-explain all of our problems and our situation before I can get to the issue at hand. The communication at their level also seems insufficient (on multiple occasions, I have gotten different several different answers from different people) and the quality of training for their agents seems to be low as well. Poor grammar and spelling from live chat agents, inability to answer basic questions or provide further support in lieu of an immediate answer, and an often bored tone of voice over the phone. Overall, Fishbowl has been complicated, difficult to use and has caused more problems than it has solved. We still feel like we're in a transition phase and will hopefully reap more benefits long term, but a warning to other businesses with a lot of internal consumption or other unique features - make sure you get a very thorough demo and vocalize exactly what you need from the system. Further, bring someone in for on-site training if you do intend to purchase this software.

It replaced a very old and unreliable product. By integrating with QuickBooks, we greatly expanded the candidate pool for our accounting department. We were able to grow our business with lower growth in staff.

The user interface allows new users to become proficient quickly. The ability to incorporate bar codes and product images is helpful. It is a great substitute for the Inventory module of QuickBooks if you need to do a lot of kitting and assemblies as well as calculating landed costs for imports.

Report writing/modifying is cumbersome. End user is captive to Fishbowl or 3rd party authors. There should be more flexibility akin to Quickbooks for users to add/subtract columns of data as well as filtering by multiple criteria. Most filters are all/everything or just one Customer, Vendor, Part Number, etc. We also had to have custom reports created for some very basic inventory management reports - FB's main purpose. More end user input should have been/should be sought EDI implementation is possible, but through 3rd party providers and automating order processing is limited.

We currently use Fishbowl to manage our inventory, process payments, and manage customer accounts. We are looking to expand and utilize many other integrations for web store and asset tracking capabilities.

The support team is always ready to dive into your database file and find the root cause of issues in your environment. Serialization and product tracking is very functional and allows us to obtain important history on each item sold Reports have high customization options and with a little SQL programming knowledge you can virtually get any information you are looking for out of the database.

Growing pains in the earlier years of Fishbowl was a little difficult but many of these have gone away after they switched from Firebird to MySQL platform. It is a little expensive.

We have been working with fishbowl for well over 2 years now. We have had tons of issues from slow performance, to the software just crashing, to upgrades not working right. The most recent upgrade made it so every thing we did took 4 mins to respond. Fishbowl took about 4 hours just to get back to us because the customer service is the worst ever. Then they blamed it on us and our environment until I told them to take our file and try it on their end. They then said there was a bug with the software. They took awhile to figure it out and promised us an update later that night. After being at work late with others trying to get through our work there was still no update. I called the next morning (about 20 times) with no answer. When I got someone to call me back (after emailing some vp with threat of legal action) they said the update was up the night before (lies as I had checked at least 15 times). Then I was told they were not answering the phone because they were having a party to celebrate the patch which "fixed" our issue. After we got it updated the issues was better but still there. The patch also broke our ODBC connection which we needed to do just to integrate because they claim it works with quickbooks but really doesn't. Then we had to spend more money on redoing a custom report that no longer worked. The list goes on and on with all the other problems we have had and workarounds we have created. We are a growing company and inquired about new users. Beware after the initial purchase any new users will cost you about 2k each. I have never seen such horrible customer support and such a badly designed piece of software. They do one thing well and that is sell you a bunch of lies until your in to deep and just say we are going with it and maybe it will get better. Please Please do yourself a favor and find something else. Even if you pay 5 times as much for a custom inventory program in the long run you will save. The loss of money and time spent fighting this crappy software is unreal. Oh and the compensation they offered for us being down a day and half was 2 hours of training which we haven't even gone through our initial training package because the staff has no clue how to use their product. I knew more after playing around with it for 5mins than our training did and we paid for him to fly out and do an in house training.