Fishbowl Reviews

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.

I like that it would allow us to keep an acuate inventory if it actually worked.

Integration to QuickBooks is horrible. And getting support for any issues takes a long time. Then you do get a person, it's very time consuming.

Migration to SQL database allowing integration with other systems.

After selling to a larger company, support is almost non existant, if your small thet dont seem to care. Have tried to book many support sessions and never any availability unless you want to wait 2+ months. Good luck getting them on the phone, the chat works and will waste an entire day trying to explain any issues

The ease of being able to track inventory via cloud, and also, being able to track through other shippers, like DHL, UPS, FEDEX, and other warehouses.

Honestly, I’ve had issues while using fishbowl, with lagging, and/or, the app being really slow. Other than that, I like the program more than I dislike the program.

Fishbowl is a valuable resource for our business. It has been extremely helpful in managing our warehouse inventory and monitoring errors. The customer support is consistently excellent, and our representative is exceptionally supportive. He goes out of his way to ensure our satisfaction with the product.

Certain reports come with an additional fee, but I recognize that writing them requires time. However, the turnaround is generally quick.

I recently joined Plusco and they had started a Fishbowl implementation. Scheduled a meeting with [sensitive content hidden], our implementation specialist and was very impressed that I got the status and all of my questions answered in a 30 minute session. Very efficient and effective.

Haven't found anything to dislike about it yet!

The ability to export to Quickbooks. This saves having to double enter items

It can be frustrating when the export fails.

Fishbowl is great inventory management software. We have very large BOMs where we need to be able to track A to Z, inventory to the production line and this does the job. It is as good as you use it and then some. Easy for people to go in and track down information according to their needs, duties and positions. Helpful reports for tracking. Vendor information and history. Customer job tracking. Costing. Great customer service.

Closing jobs. Once a job or sales is closed, it's pretty much closed. Once it transfers to QB, forget it! It's nice to have the option to be able to go back a little, but Disassembling is not fun. Would like some form of CRM, integration?

It handles sales order entry well throughout the manufacturing and shipping process. It also handles the purchasing of parts from different vendors extremely well. The Bill of Materials handles multiple levels of assemblies within assemblies very well.

It has a lot of good pricing rules for all kinds of occasions. But it lacks last cost pricing for manufactured products.

Integration with our manufacturing process was easy. Purchases, Receiving, Bill of materials and Work Orders fulfilled our needs.

Reports provided are too basic, no help documentation to create your own reports. If you need a detailed or custom reports you have to purchase them apart.

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!

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.

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.