Fishbowl Reviews

Fishbowl is easy to use and affordable. Outstanding customer support.

There really isn't anything I don't like about Fishbowl. It's been a great software for our company.

Controlling inventory and sales management

Creating customized reports can be cumbersome

It appeared to be a great product before we purchased it

Point of sale software is nearly un-usable. It does not support gift cards or customer accounts in any functional way. Implementation and support from the software company are beyond poor even after paying many thousands of dollars for extra support and help with implementation.

It integrates seamlessly with our other software and is very easy to implement.

It can become expensive to add extra users or have custom add ons to the product.

It is powerful inventory tracking software that can be built out to your needs

It can be expensive to build out custom reporting and features with fishbowl

Ease of use. Seem to make updates from requested ideas.

They don't currently have an online version, only through hosted.

The ease of using and tracking our inventory

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

Nice looking interface and very easy to use. The REST API is very easy to work with.

It would be a great feature to allow 3PL to bill their customers from Fishbowl.

Thus far, I really appreciate the integration of many realms of the business in a single location.

There are minor details to how we individual run the process of International sales vs Domestic. We have found that this leaves us a few extra steps, to track material movements than we like.

Logical progression of activity and inventory movement. System is reliable and like anything else if it is used properly, you can rely on the results for inventory verification, PO status and exporting to QuickBooks.

the reports feature needs work to better assimilate data as I find the need to get outside help to write reports that I like to see but is nice to see that it assimilates in the system

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.

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.

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.

It's user friendly and and its ability to grow with the company.

The inability to track types of changes made automaticlly.

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.

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!

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?

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)

When Functional, it is a good software. Order Management, fulfillment, inventory updates, accounting integrations are all great. keyword is WHEN it functions properly.

I was on the phone with fishbowl support at least 4-5 times a month. One issue after another, and although extremely friendly, i was given either incorrect information, or sent to an inbox with no reply. I could not get order fulfillment to work, my customers wouldn't receive tracking numbers. They blamed Woocommerce, but when i switched to multiple other competitors it worked just fine. We also had a ton of shipping integration issues.

Any orders that had a credit card declined wouldnt come into fishbowl either. Just super glitchy

Woocommerce customers, try out orderhive, its working great for what i am doing.

Inventory Tracking is the biggest thing. Easy of use with Sales Order and Purchase Orders. It sends my accounting info to Quickbooks automatically at the end of the day.

Set up was a little time consuming. It took some effort to get everything in properly and just adapting to the new software functionality.

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

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.

The program is intuitive and extremely in depth. We a food manufacturer (coffee roaster) and we invoice through Fishbowl. We are not yet using the mobile app, so I can't talk about that. Unlike our accounting system (brand Q), one module smoothly integrates with the next. It is easy to administer and our users just get it. It is the standard by which other database systems should be measured. The integration with Quickbooks is painless. Fully automated and has never, never failed. I have not had one single

Their chat support isn't the most knowledgeable. They do have the option of custom fields, but there isn't the option to make some fields visible/invisible. The server occasionally locks up, however, all you need to do is restart. No fuss.

Decent product. The interface is a little dated, and some standard thing you would expect in functionality are missing or difficult to use. But, overall, it is a decent product if your goal is to have an inventory and order management system that integrates with Quickbooks.

You will get no support unless you complain. We just updated our license, paid for a year of support. Still waiting 48 hours later for a call back from support. This is normal.

When you do get the support you will most likely start with the lowest level support and have to either speak to the real support people through an intermediary or have to wait another day or two for the next level of support to call you back. Repeat that process until you finally get to someone who knows what they are talking about.

Support this expensive should be fantastic. Instead, I am not certain what they could do to make this any worse.

Fishbowl software allows my company to always be in the know of our inventory position.
It is EASY to learn and easy to use.
This week I am adding 7 more users and having All my "on-the-road" salesmen use FISHBOWL directly. For Sales processing, for Inventory stocking orders, for Creating customers etc... Its that easy to use!!
A big shout out to my EASTERN Support team for the great support through CHAT, and to Jordan Boyce as he currently has been really taking care of my issues for my immediate upgrading of my use with Fishbowl. Adding FISHBOWL HOSTING to my affiliation with FB to secure that my Mobile Salesmen are using a STABLE environment!

Some REPORTS are not in the nicest format, nor have the best "filters" to navigate.
As well Little features [like spell check in email body templates] are missing, but Fishbowl does often upgrade their platform with new releases which often has these fixes.

Part and product searchability is excellent for companies with lots of sku's
POS functionality is OK, but not super.

Instability: Crashes several times a week - usually have to have a call with support at least once a week
Poor accounting integration - QB integration is not as seamless as advertised.

Very inefficient: Simple tasks take a long time. all the needed information on a part/product is stored in three separate tabs. For example: you cannot find, List price, cost price, and current inventory in one place.

Quirky errors all over the place - discounts disappearing, invoice dollar amounts changing after being posted to QB.

Issued orders randomly deleted from the system

required items don't show up in the Auto-PO reports

Reporting functionality is exceptionally rigid and often unhelpful

lack of drill-down information

huge wait times for technical support

Mistakes cannot be corrected after posted to FB