Fishbowl Erfahrungen

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.

Knowledgeable and resourceful to solve an issue that is not everyday.

The fact I actually have to wait. When one uses FishBowl to manage their entire business and there is an issue, waiting means lost revenue.

Its very easy to work with. Although you have to pay attention on what tabs you are on/in.

Can't think of anything at the moment. Other than having to make sure that you are in the right module,

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.

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.

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 meets our basic needs for manufacturing and sales.

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.

Simple and straight forward. Easy to get data in and out of the system.

Support.
Lacking in features for manufacturing processes.

It's extremely helpful to track our inventory at multiple warehouses and for planning our future inventory needs. The wide array of reports is super helpful for a growing business such as ours. It's extremely helpful for us to be able to track what's been ordered by a customer, what is left in stock, and if we have anymore stock coming in. It's truly changed the way we do our business.

It was definitely a learning curve for a lot of people on our team and some processes can be a little tricky until you fully understand exactly how it works.

Easy to use, and thorough support documentation

Cost seems high for the program when compared to other services

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!

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!

Inventory tracking is mediocre at best - A pro was required for the review.

Customer service is terrible. Once you sign up and pay thousands for their system, they virtually tell you to "figure it out yourself". Information from QuickBooks to Fishbowl does not properly transfer. The invoicing process is extremely cumbersome. There are a lot of unnecessary steps when invoicing and processing orders. To edit invoice lines is extremely difficult. You cannot edit invoices once they have been processed. Printing and formatting (two very simple things) have been overly difficult with this program. We have had to reach out to Fishbowl numerous times to have the system tailored to our needs.

Fishbowl works like it should and is expected to but make sure everyone who will be using it understands how it works and how things should to be set

Can't fix mistakes made once something is fulfilled
Not all feature will work for company
The reporting could be better

Fishbowl has sped up our process from ordering to sending out invoices to our customers. We used to do it by hand, and now Fishbowl automatically does it for me. It then sends it over to Quickbooks with a push of a button. It saves us so much time.

When Fishbowl goes down (doesn't happen often) it takes a long time to get help to get everything back up and running. I was recently on a phone call for 3 hours to get Fishbowl back up and running. I also wish Fishbowl could take the tracking numbers and push them over to QuickBooks. I also wish Fishbowl could use 2 or 3 email addresses instead of just 1 email. You can log more than 1 email address but not use it when sending emails or pushing over to QuickBooks. They still haven't figured out why one of my license's won't work on one of my computers. They told me after a long time I have to look into it on my end.