Fishbowl reviews

The manufacturing module lets us build parts and put in inventory, which is what we needed (and did not have) in the past

Price was a bit high but if it all works the way we have been promised, it will pay for itself. There has been alot of changes in the past 5 years from the old FB, so we are hoping it is all going to work and help us all to be more proficient.

inventory count is easier to track which makes ordering product easier.

set up time and getting help from account manager

Ease of use for inventory, integrated features such as scanner makes it easy to scan and remove product from stock

Have seen people complain about privacy problems, i haven’t had these problems though.

How it integrated with QuickBooks Online.

Reporting is not as flexible as it should be.

I liked being able to research different job titles in my career field and area of work.

I didn't like that I couldn't always see some details about certain companies.

The quick customer service to answer any IT questions

It can be hard to learn all that it is capable of

Great customer service so far and have a great program

No too many cons, but the main one being there is no live 3d warehouse image.

Better version of box storm with more helpful experts

Nothing really as of now cause ive been helped

Fishbowl has been an absolute lifesaver as our business has grown. Our processes before were incredibly manual and analog, and therefore susceptible to a lot more human error. The time we're saving not having to manually comb through printed sales estimates to and then walk around the warehouse to see if we have the inventory on hand to fulfill it them is absolutely immeasurable. So many processes are automated which has drastically improved our accuracy and efficiency, and therefore our bottom line. If we weren't using Fishbowl, I'm certain our business would not have been able to grow at the rate it has, so I firmly believe the investment has more than paid for itself, and as far as I'm aware, we're barely even scratching the surface with its capabilities.

It's software, so it's going to have its bugs now and then. Fortunately any I've noticed have been a minor inconvenience at worst; nothing has caused our data to be inaccurate in any way. Otherwise, I wish modifying reports was a little more user-friendly. If I could easily add a specific filter to a report, I could be substantially more efficient.

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! :)

My software implementation specialist was friendly.

I wish I would have thoroughly read these reviews before making the awful decision to give fishbowl a try. I had been in the market for this type of software for a while and had a long conversation with a fishbowl sales rep who promised me that fishbowl could do exactly what I was needing. I was hesitant, because it did not seem like this was true, but he promised me they could do a "custom build" that would address my company's specific needs. Most importantly, he assured me over and over that I could get a full refund if it turned out that the software was not a fit for my company. He promised that I would be able to go through training, implementation, and use the software for a full 30 days after the end of training to decide if it was going to work out. So I spent countless hours over the next several months in the training and implementation of the product. Throughout the training, I expressed my doubts that it would work out, but I had hopes that the "custom build" would be the solution. Training concluded, implementation began, I tried my best to make this thing work for my company, but we were approaching the money-back deadline, no custom build had been provided, and I could not see any way this software would do what I needed. So I attempted to contact my sales rep multiple times via email and phone but got no response. Miraculously, four days AFTER the deadline, I was finally able to communicate with someone who informed me that my sales rep was no longer with the company and that I had missed the deadline for a refund. So let's try that custom build now and see if that'll work. So we did, and to no one's surprise, it was still useless. I again asked for a refund at that point but was denied - "past the deadline." And all this communication was by email because they refuse to offer a phone number to actually speak with someone. So after a complete waste of $14,000 and about year of my time, I'm right back where I started, except poorer and older. I would STRONGLY advise thinking twice before entering into any relationship with fishbowl.

Search function is amazing! Really like Fishbowl for the most part. Ordering, inventory tracking, automatic updating, etc.

1) Can't look at a part and see how many times it was ordered easily. Have to go in and out of the purchase orders. Would like to look at a part, see how often it was ordered and from whom, how many were ordered and how much we paid in a simple list form. Right now I only see the PO/Vendor without any of the important details like quantity ordered and cost.
2) I also think the Revision for an item should follow the part. It does not. There is a revision field that shows up on the purchase order, but doesn't print anywhere AND is not the same field from the Part Detail screen. In a manufacturing environment the revision for any given part should follow the part around the database, including onto purchase orders so the vendor knows what to fabricate. Right now I have to manually enter the revision on the vendor screen. The revision from the Part Detail screen should automatically populate on the Vendor screen for said part so that when the item is ordered, it appears on the purchase order .
3) I find the documentation sometimes lacking detail.
4) I'd also like to be able to create custom reports myself and without turning back the hands of time and forcing Java to use an old revision (required for iReport). A report creation function in Fishbowl would be awesome! Even my archaic old Parts & Vendors software allowed me to do create custom reports.

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.