Fishbowl Reviews

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!

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

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

The inability to track types of changes made automaticlly.

Ease of Quickbooks Online integration, ease of cost analysis

Reports are not as easy to manipulate as some programs

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

The versatility of viewing and tracking inventory the way we wanted to.

It lacked accounting software that we needed.

The software is easy to use and intuitive. Unlike SAP and others, a new person can jump in and start using the software day one. Things are easy to find and the learning curve is days not months. A system the people won't use is worthless.

Can't think of anything...does what we need it to do.

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.

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.

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!

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
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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! :)

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.

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.

One of the team members was my point of contact for our recent issue. We started upgrade at close of business and ran into issue late in the night. The upgrade process had been test driven successfully on the new target servers prior but something in the tag data at the moment of upgrade caused a failure. We opened for business the next AM dead in the water. They were excellent in his handling of the issue and giving it the attention we needed as our business was on hold due to the issue. The DB Tech that worked on the problem was also on point in the solving of the issue.

Only cure for bugs is full upgrade. Given that we have many custom reports it does not make it an easy option. Would like to also see support for iReport as it is bundled with your product but discontinued on it's own. Lastly, would like to see a solution that would create true "Admin" level accounts. We have in house admins that get all rights but cannot affect "Company" (and other misc) settings without using the factory "Admin" account.

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.

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.

It was good in the past... fishbowl has gone downhill

Fishbowl support doesn't know how to fix their own software. My fishbowl has been unusable for months, I have been in contact with Fishbowl on a number of occasions trying to get the issue resolved.. the GUI keeps glitching. The user interface is not display properly and the glitching in the GUI makes it impossible to work. Instead of fixing the problem me They just try and blame it on your computer. I have a new Alienware computer that is extremely powerful. I've been a very loyal Fishbowl customer over the years, but if this issue doesn't get resolved , I will have no choice but to bring my business elsewhere.

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.

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.