Powerful, Affordable Inventory and Order Management Software

Stated simply, Fishbowl is the best in it's class, period! Easy to use, incredibly effective and affordable Inventory and Order Management Software.

Pros

Fishbowl offers and unparalleled ease of use. Our whole team was trained and up and running in hours. You simply won't find another software package with the range of features and reliability at this price range. It easily bests other software packages costing 3 times what Fishbowl costs!

Cons

Their call back support could be a little faster, but it's still likely better than most software companies.

Can be a great product but will depend on your personnel

Pros

I'm an Advanced QuickBooks Pro Advisor and I specialize in Inventory set up and management. I haven't found any program with as many capabilities at such a low cost range as Fishbowl. Netsuite can handle what Fishbowl does but can easily go into the hundreds of thousands to setup and get started and I found the process very complex. Fishbowl on the other hand, can import from QuickBooks and have you set up and running in just a few minutes, though I stress that this should be used as test only. To accurately use Fishbowl it can take months to setup and learn properly. This largely depends on your current experience with technology, accounting practices and inventory knowledge.

Cons

The support isn't stable. Depending on your time zone, you'll get a different team. Some zones, depending on the day and time, will pick up your call immediately and be very knowledgeable and helpful. Others will take a day to get back to you and you'll get someone who's only been there a few months but will confidently tell you something as fact and you might find our later they don't actually know what they're talking about. However, the online wiki is very detailed so if you're someone who can figure out things on your own, this will be a huge help. Basically, I've found that most people who complain about Fishbowl are really complaining about inventory, which is hugely complex. But if you're a detail oriented company with personnel who don't cut corners, Fishbowl can be an excellent fit for you. Just don't expect it to be easy!

Results of Request for Customized Pick Ticket Report

We were all extremely impressed with the talent and expertise of the Fishbowl Reports team. They were genuinely interested in helping us improve our processes by designing a report that met our specific needs. They were in constant communication with us throughout the design, installation, test and acceptance phases of our project and truly exceeded our expectations!

Pros

Although we requested a relatively minor modification to the resident Pick Ticket report, we were extremely pleased as to the quality and speed at which the modified report was provided to us by the Fishbowl Reports team. Specifically, we had requested our applicable lot numbers of each of our respective products be visible on the new report, and it indeed operates just as advertised and is a big time-saver for our team.

Cons

We had absolutely no issues with the design, installation or testing of our custom report.

Fishbowl Is a Highly Functional Software Service

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.

Pros

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.

Cons

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.

The updates are killing me

Pros

The customer support is great. It's just hard to get a hold of them when you need to speak to a live person on the phone. The people who work there are the nicest and most helpful when you do get to talk to them and they do resolve the day to day issues that pop up. ie, inventory getting stuck in committed status is a pretty quick fix, but then again, should it really happen in the first place?. Bigger problems take more time to fix, but they seem to keep working on it until its resolved. The people they have providing training are excellent. The wikis are pretty easy to access and are pretty good

Cons

This year the updates seem to break something that's had been working. Then it takes hours with customer support to fix and get going again. The phone support team could use more staff because it does take hours to get a call back. The reports are difficult to customize, you have to know programming. There is no simple report writer function or a reports that can be customized. If you have to pick inventory from two locations for one sales order, it will create two invoices. There is no way around that in Fishbowl. The calendar is pretty basic, could use enhancements. The inventory export CSV file does not use FIFO, but average costing. So if you use FIFO or any other method other than average costing, you have to use a different report instead of getting the data in CSV format. The shipping module is frustrating and the way it is set up does not allow us to use carton count efficiently, so we have to change the packing list after it's printed. If you want Fishbowl to count the cartons for you, you have to add each carton manually. And if you do that, it will not total or summarize the number of cartons you have, it will list each one individually. So you could have a packing list that could be several pages long. The UPS integration used to be great and then UPS updated, Fishbowl did not support the updated software and we had to change to UPS Worldship. Definitely a step backwards because the old integration worked beautifully. Now it's more manual and cumbersome.