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

Can be used in multiple locations via server. UPS integration. Accurate inventory control

Cons

None to speak of. Every program will have it's pluses and minuses. Overall great value for the investment.

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

Supply management,shipping management,order based system and it's quite simple to use.

Cons

Still don't find any major bug or issue on this. I assumed it's a one of the best product available in the market. The single tool has various features which is quite commendable.I recommend everyone to use this product

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

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

The entry and setup are easy to use. It is a pretty simple MRP.

Cons

The reporting and label creation/printing capabilities are weak and cumbersome. There is no PLM functionality. It would be nice to setup prototype BOMs and then walk that product through a workflow that saves all of the changes, revisions and approvals throughout the product history.

Pros

Great management software that lets me manage my warehouse with ease.

Cons

A little pricey, but well worth the cost. This is a great software.

Pros

It makes sales and asset management very easy to use.

Cons

No cons till now. I am not a very frequent user still.

Pros

I loved that this made me look at tracking my inventory in a new way

Cons

I thought there were a lot of features I ended up not using very much

Pros

Our team found both these ease of use and relative ease of integration to be among the most attractive components of Fishbowl. The variety of modules allow close monitoring of essentially every aspect of
physical asset tracking . With Fishbowl we can organize warehouse parts inventory , print labels,and
organize purchase orders which organizes our supply side. Fishbowl's sales side module allows for effective tracking of lead times as well as sales item forecasting so we are never behind on available inventory .

Cons

Fishbowl Manufacturing software at this time time requires the use of a server which we had to supply .
In exchange for all other features , we see this as a nominal and not inconvenient requirement as at the time we were adding new computer assets. This requirement may not suit all smaller companies.

Alternatives Considered

kintone and Finale Inventory

Reasons for Switching to Fishbowl

We selected Fishbowl Inventory Management software over alternatives for its comprehensive module options which allow for a complete organization of our office and warehouse now optimized with a primary consideration to sales output and production. We could not ask for more in this area of business operations.

Pros

Fishbowl helps us maintain all lot tracing records, re-order points, and sales and purchase orders. It makes audit time much simpler!

Cons

There aren't as many reports as I would like and it isn't very intuitive to setup - we had to hire an outside expert.

Alternatives Considered

Wherefour

Reasons for Choosing Fishbowl

It was too difficult to prepare for an audit.

Reasons for Switching to Fishbowl

Customer service and overall capabilities

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

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

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.

Cons

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.

Pros

Customer support is thorough when you are able to reach them.

Software was very easy to understand and implement. There are a few valuable stock reports.

Data module allows you to write your own SQL queries.

Cons

1. IT issues
a. Having to reset company server every Sunday. As per IT department, this is a known issue on Fishbowl’s end with no plans to fix
b. Having to reset fishbowl server every day due to export failures. Again, known issue.
c. The client stalls on our staff daily. Just this past week, collectively we've had to kill the application 40 times due to random lock-ups. This is not an issue on our IT department's end.
d. Our quickbook's database has increased tenfold due to the amount of exports fishbowl has made over the last three years. Manuvering in Quickbook's is now a nightmare here in Canada since users are unable to compress the database anymore.
2. Internal Control
a. No audit trail as it relates to changes to SKUs, POs, SOs, changes to inventory valuations
b. Inability to lock down PO and SO items after they are issued
c. Inability to police SKU creation. We need users to be able to create SKUs and submit to management for approval. Once approved, the SKU details are locked down. Fishbowl's user account control is VERY limited.
3. Reporting
a. Poor inventory reporting – not able to view listing at a specific date. Fishbook’s workaround does not reconcile to the quickbooks ledger since the report is only a snapshot and not an actual valuation at that date.
b. Not able to customize views on reports such as POs, SOs, etc.
c. Inventory days aging calculation is flawed. If I move inventory to another location, it resets to zero. That is not how days in inventory is properly calculated. Fishbowl can’t calculate this measure since historical values are not stored. Same with GMROII.
d. Inability to create custom reports to track measures such as inventory performance and turnover. Historical carrying cost data is not stored.
4. Poor integration with Quickbooks
a. If SKUs accounts were not correctly mapped, a change must be made in both fishbowl and quickbooks after the fact. If we were able to police SKU creation properly, this would rarely be an issue.
b. Live inventory valuation in Fishbowl almost never agrees with ledger and I can’t figure out why.

Pros

About Me: 10+ years of programming, web development, database design, jack-of-all-trades IT.

Fishbowl Use:
7 months total, including full implementation and continuing support, now delving into internal custom development

Before you even try Fishbowl's software, make VERY detailed flowcharts of your existing and ideal processes. Then, locate and read every single page of their forums. Then, read every page of their Wiki. I'm serious; it isn't that long, and the internet doesn't contain much information about Fishbowl, for reasons unknown. As you read, compare the available options VERY carefully to your list of requirements. If none of those pages tells you that you CAN do a certain thing in Fishbowl, then you CANNOT do it. Fishbowl's marketing mentions what it can do in no uncertain terms.

Cons

It is telling that one of Fishbowl's developers, Israel Lopez, co-founded a company called FishBooksPro, which provides support and custom programming services for Fishbowl and QuickBooks.

Fishbowl allows you to take payment via credit card, interfacing with QuickBooks Merchant Services, but there is no way to associate a payment with an order. This example of a nearly-complete feature set is representative of the shortcomings that you will encounter when using Fishbowl.

Our Fishbowl server software began freezing several times each day, after upgrading from v11.7 to 12.2. "Reinstall" was FB tech support's first response. How do you suppose upper management in my company will receive that 'solution'? My next step will be to find out how to clear Java caches manually (outside of Control Panel), which I'll try before reinstalling.

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 and NetSuite