Fishbowl Reviews

Pros

This software is easy to use and easy to deploy. Great extension for QB users. It can also connect Shopify, Amazon, Ebay, Shipping management such as Shiprush, etc.

Cons

In Inventory, you have 2 types of materials: Part and Product. This is somehow confusing.

Pros

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.

Cons

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.

Pros

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).

Cons

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.

Alternatives Considered

GiftLogic and Trident 1

Reasons for Switching to Fishbowl

We chose Fishbowl because it the functionality and capability that they claimed to have, as well as their unique kitting feature.

Pros

It's a very efficient to provides features that helps businesses to manage their inventory effortlessly. The software is very easy to use and offers great features like Inventory management, Sales and purchasing, Manufacturing management, etc.

Cons

It's little bit hard to fix problems without having support from their team. Other than this I didn't have any issue with the software.

Pros

Fishbowl software is easy to use. I like that you always have step by step instructions and some videos to help guide you. If you don't find what you are looking for, all it takes is an email, and support helps you as quickly as they can.

Cons

The only negative issue I have while using Fishbowl software is with the reports. Even though they have multiple reports to choose from, I feel as some of them can be upgraded to include more than one product a t a time. Example, when searching for a product that was sold on a particular day, and you have more than one size of the same product, it would be nice to be able to select as many products as you want to look at versus one at a time.

Pros

It meets our basic needs for manufacturing and sales.

Cons

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.

Alternatives Considered

inFlow Inventory

Reasons for Choosing Fishbowl

Manufacturing needs were not met using InFlow.

Switched From

inFlow Inventory

Reasons for Switching to Fishbowl

Allows inventory management for manufacturing purposes.

Pros

I like the ease of use with the Sales Order Side of the product. When the software is set up correctly it is almost flawless, and really makes the ordering process go much smoother. The interface is easy to use and easy to train new employees on.

Cons

The service and support are the worst I have ever dealt with. We paid dearly for the implementation of our data and if I say the words half ass that would hardly describe what they were able to accomplish. Getting someone to try and fix anything is nearly impossible, so we took it upon ourselves to correct all of their implementation mistakes. 3 months in and we still find implementation errors every day that we are correcting. When we attempt to use support their chat feature is useless, as the reps are answering multiple chats at once and it takes 5 minutes between comments for them to come back to you. If you call be prepared to sit on hold for at least an hour, and then they still wont be able to assist you most of the time.

Pros

The ease of using and tracking our inventory

Cons

It still is not 100% accurate- there were errors in our set up -not sure if it was internal or with the software.

Pros

From an administrator standpoint it is very easy to implement and maintain. From a end user standpoint it is very easy to train new Fishbowl users, all modules are designed with the end users ease of use in mind. Technical Support personnel are very knowledgeable and usually isolate and fix and issues quickly.

Cons

I wish the reporting side of Fishbowl was more robust, Home Care Industries is a manufacturer they rely heavily on making sure raw materials are on hand or on order to meet customer orders. Having a true MPS or MRP as part of Fishbowl with be a great enhancement.

Pros

There is minimum self-promotion. People drive the conversations about jobs, experience, and new opportunities. You might bump into a peer in your company or in the same company but in a different country. It is interesting to find new people as well.

Cons

Some fields like IT, tech, blockchain, AI, etc are very popular but information and conversations about professions like mine - ie education are less and hence I could not use it for more than a few months.

Pros

QuickBooks integration is probably the feature I appreciate the most about Fishbowl. Any small to mid sized business that is outgrowing QuickBooks inventory management features but doesn't want to pay the price of an all-inclusive ERP program targeted for larger corporations should consider Fishbowl Inventory. The ability to track inventory by location, assign multiple vendors to one item, create intuitive bill of materials items that are as simple or complex as you wish, add multitudes of pricing rules for your products and customers, assign reorder points and order up to levels for your parts to quickly reorder items that are low, Fishbowl plugins that connect to a wide range of third party programs, I could go on for a long time about what there is to like about this program. Their support has definitely improved over the years as well, with a response to a support ticket usually within the hour.

Cons

One inherent weakness with Fishbowl is the QuickBooks export connection. Fishbowl has made tremendous improvements in this area since we first started using it, but there are still multiple times that we need to restart the connection before running an export. To be fair, this may be as much QuickBooks' problem as Fishbowl's. The software also tends to be buggy after new releases. Again, they have improved lightyears over what they were 8 years ago, but still be prepared to have some weird things happen occasionally when a software update is released. Also, Fishbowl only has rudimentary accounting functions and leaves the majority of accounting related tasks to QuickBooks. This can create accounting headaches and even nightmares if the wrong QuickBooks accounts are assigned to items in Fishbowl. I do miss the QuickBooks ability to map transactions directly to expense accounts. In Fishbowl, you must create an item and then map it to the correct QuickBooks expense account, which again asks for accountant's nightmares.

Pros

The Part & Product feature works fine.
The Calendar function is good.

This guy (can't say his name) was the ONLY PERSON that should not take the blame for a bad customer support. He was excellent and I am very thankful to him!

Cons

Everything, or pretty much everything.

Customer service is TERRIBLE, really, I am not exaggerating, it is the W O R S T P A I D customer service I've ever seen, looks like that they are your customer instead.

Glitches, you will find MANY glitches! After 7 months using it and having issues with my inventory quantities day after day, month after month, I came across to a discrepancy in my inventory numbers that I was sure that wasn't a human error, got (miracle) on hold with their support team and what happened?
"This is a glitch in your database that we can't solve, what YOU(yes, we, the customers) will have to do is to start a NEW database, from ZERO"
And guess what?
"Oh, by the way, you CAN'T import SO's that were already fulfilled/shipped(that means that we LOST our HISTORY of everything that we sold from the past 7 MONTHS!)"
Do you think they helped me to import data to the new DB? No they did not, they simply stated that this is unlawful and they would not be helping me on the process.
Plus, but not least, you CAN'T, as well, import fulfilled PO's, meaning that you also loses the history of your purchases! (like, dude, seriously?)

Everything above is part of my recent issues, pretty much all that had happened around 09-01-2016 - 09-15-2016
_____________________________________________________________________________________________

Let's talk about scanning (yes we also did the mistake of purchasing the scanner and Fishbowl GO).
Mind you that I am not even going to talk about the promises that were made in terms of fulfilling our needs and stuff, so you can assume that everything I am concerned about, it's just because we've spoke about it before purchasing it.

Scanning(Fishbowl GO) is SIMPLE, that's the word.
If you need to scan order's(doesn't a matter if it's a SO or PO) by boxes, FORGET ABOUT IT, the system will bring over the total amount of pieces/boxes that you are supposed to receive right after the first scanned bar code. What I want to say with that is that you ARE NOT ABLE to scan orders by boxes, having the sum of everything at the end, and THEN matching with the order.

Police actions
Pretty much everything in the system can be changed, when comes to dates, memos, SO's, PO's, etc. But Fishbowl won't hold a tracking of who has changed it, it simply won't. That's a big deal for us, and I believe for the majority as well.

UOM - Conversions
Be careful when setting UOM's and Conversions, this can REALLY screw up with your inventory!

Training
DO YOURSELF A FAVOR AND TAKE NOTES ABOUT THAT - IT'S REALLY IMPORTANT!
They will usually provide you with a 12h (the basic package) support, which will be also used to train you.
Along the way with Fishbowl, pieces of information were given to me in a monthly basis. Meaning that I did not have someone that would come to me, study our needs deeply and work with it.
Instead, I had to "play with it(as per what they told me to do)" and find errors, problems, situations where I'd need support with, in order to get an answer.
YOU MUST KNOW exactly what you need, you must let them know it, and you must BOTHER them in order to get information. They will simply careless if you have a big issue.
It took me about 6 months to fully (if I really do understand it) understand the software, and it was VERY painful. I don't even remember how many times I took the blame for errors that I came to realize that weren't my fault, but fishbowl's lack of information (or misleading information).

I would not be writing all that if I was even a bit happy with the purchase, my life has been a nightmare since we bought it, mind you it was 7 months ago. The software isn't that bad, Fishbowl's consultants are the problem, or it's company's culture.

Do yourself another favor, look trough all the bad reviews in here, it's very easy to manipulate good reviews, but the bad ones you cant. Make sure you have everything explained, and PLEASE, use the 30 DAY MONEY BACK GUARANTEE to dig into the software, even if you have to create fake SO's and PO's to test it, even if you have to spend 8h/day during the whole month working on it, but DO IT, I assure you that it will help A LOT to really find out if that works or not for your company.

I hope that you understand that this is a review of a very, very, VERY disappointed customer, and that in any situation I'd dispose myself to screw a company like that if I wasn't right.

I hope you read it all and wish you better luck than what we had! :)

Pros

At first the customer support was great. You could call and a human would answer the phone and log into your screen and help you quickly. Those days are over apparently.

Cons

Fishbowl support has gone in the toilet. The phone menu you get for support doesn't even have an option for just solving a workflow problem or explaining an unexpected error or problem. They have the call back feature, which can take hours, if they actually call back. They promise to look into problems and then don't.

Pros

The 2016 front end looks slick. There is an API, but it will cost you more to hire a progammer to figure out how to integrate with it than to just get better softwate that plays better.

Cons

THE SUPPORT IS HIDEOUS, THE MOBILE APP IS USELESS, SALESPEOPLE ARE LIARS

Pros

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.

Cons

* 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)

Pros

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.

Cons

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.

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.

Pros

If you do simple wholesale, this is fine if you don't need their support.

Cons

1) Constantly crashing and supports wants money for bunch of error codes when doing export to Quickbook
2) Tons of data always didn't get exported and FB is no where for help
3) Can't pull accurate report on inventory valuation summary, excel export is garbage and hard to sort, can't sort valuation summary by date, and all reporting feature are just bad
4) They will ask for a lot of money when their software constantly crashes and hard to reach anyone to help
5) Very difficult to use for manufacturing such as selecting bill of material and etc.

Pros

Ease of use but especially the customer service. the employees are very knowledgeable of the product and how it should be used.

Cons

I really do not have one . If there is a problem I can always count on customer service to assist.

Alternatives Considered

NetSuite

Reasons for Switching to Fishbowl

Price

Pros

All the features for the stock control, to tack the stock the full range of reports the customize dashboard. The purchasing and sales has great functionalities that make the management easy also it is easy for the user.

Cons

When i have stock take i find difficult to note have some feature to support or make it easy, the only option is the cycle count file export and import.

Alternatives Considered

AscendTMS Logistics Software, NetSuite and DaVinci Resolve

Pros

Cycle Counting Functionality, Lot Traceability, Can track customer specific fields like Country of Origin, Carton Quantity, any specific as needed. The activity report is very detailed to track parts and what user touched them last. We import and are able to easily hold the product in our inventory for dollar value but as 'in-transit' (not sellable or pickable) once it sails until it actually hits the door. Inventory dollars between FB and Quickbooks are very accurate.

Cons

Does not have an EASY way to handle 'outside processing'; It can be done with transfer orders, but it is a bit time consuming.
Currently, the Activity Report is losing user ids.

Pros

Nothing. There is nothing in this entire software that has made our jobs easier or more convenient.

Cons

I have a lot of complaints about Fishbowl. It feels like the kind of software that someone had a really good idea and set out to develop the code but then got bored with it or ran out of money so stopped developing before it was complete.
Sure it works for a few industries but I would definitely not go and call it a robust manufacturing software.