Fishbowl Inventory Reviews & Product Details

The total cost of the product and its overall ease of use are important factors for me. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

My main concern is the lack of options to correct or fix data once an error is discovered. While I realize that certain financial information must remain unchanged after periods are closed, even a simple mistake can create significant problems for future reporting if there is no way to address it. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Fishbowl works reasonably well as an inventory tool for simple, repeatable workflows. It connects to QuickBooks and can support basic order processing and inventory tracking, especially for businesses with steady, predictable demand and e-commerce style ordering. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Fishbowl is not a good fit for food manufacturing. It struggles with the complexity of changing production schedules, frequent changeovers, and seasonal volume swings. The system is rigid and better suited to stable, repeatable orders than to dynamic food production. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Easy to intergrate with our sales systems. We moved from our own website design that was causing issues and when we found shopify, we desperately needed an inventory system that worked and flowed with that and really allowed our warehouse to focus on the growth happening and manage orders 10x easier than before. Overall our warehouse team has not had any issues with getting any help or errors resolved with their tech support. Good service all around! Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The initial setup and integration was hard for us specifically since we were coming from our own outdated systems to the 21st century and we learned really quick what we were missing out on before with this new system. After some time, we got everything working together seamlessly. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I really felt like the training staff at Fishbowl are super engaged and passionate about the work they are doing. I had the pleasure to work with Garrett Dean, and he was amazing,completely engaged and had great ideas for how to leverage the software to work for you. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

There are various modules that make the software expensive, it is important to do your reach to understand what you will need and how this will roll out for your organization. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Fishbowl is very rigid and strict about what it does. It forces you to be accurate on inventory numbers, production, etc. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

That rigidness can be great but it makes it so the integrations aren't dynamic forcing you to have to do a lot of manual work. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Support team very helpful and knowledgeable on their product. Some features available in FB not available in QB hence we tried to make the switch Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Rigidity. Implementation team knows their product but is not knowledgeable about interface and impact on apps they impact, in our case QuickBooks. It is one thing to tell your customers integration with QuickBooks works very well, it is another to help customer embark on Fishbowl and NOT offer any support as soon as issue is on QB (but stems from the integration with FB).

Implementation team quick to send you to support team while they should be knowledgeable about everything including the apps they claim their product integrate well with.

Obviously, no support whatsoever when you want to disconnect FB and revert to old system because integration did not work and wreak havoc in your system and operations. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Fishbowl's customer support is unmatched - every single person I have interacted with has been amazing and so helpful. The implementation process while lengthy has gone smoothly due to such amazing customer service. As we learn how to use Fishbowl, I find its systems very straightforward and intuitive even with the learning curve. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The setup process was very time consuming and sometimes confusing, but we have had such amazing support throughout the entire process. There are some features for our existing ERP that are not quite the same in Fishbowl, but it seems that the custom reports team will be able to help with one of those important aspects. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The underlying MySQL database makes writing queries straightforward, which is one of Fishbowl's few technical strengths. It allows for easier data extraction and custom reporting, though it’s unfortunate that Fishbowl doesn’t deliver the same level of user-friendly functionality. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Summary: Over the past several years, we’ve experienced a significant decline in the quality and reliability of Fishbowl's software, prompting us to seek alternative solutions. Below are the key issues we encountered.

Declining Quality: The quality of the software has steadily declined, leading to frequent issues such as breaking changes in updates and incorrect reporting. Features that once worked seamlessly now cause more problems than they solve, which is unacceptable for any business reliant on accurate data.

Misleading Sales Practices: During the presales process, our implementation engineer and salesperson assured us that a specific feature existed, only to discover post-purchase that they were mistaken. This kind of miscommunication is frustrating and costly for our business.

Poor Account Management: Our account manager is rarely responsive unless there’s a potential sale involved. This lack of support and engagement leaves us feeling undervalued as customers.

Unnecessary and Overpriced Features: When new features do arrive, they are often irrelevant or priced exorbitantly as add-ons. For example, critical features that our business relied on, such as product notifications, were altered in ways that made them useless.

Inadequate Inventory Management: Despite being centered around inventory management, the system falls short in basic functionality. Adding new tracking fields to an existing system is cumbersome, and the inability to store attachments at the inventory level is a glaring oversight.

Support Contract Issues: The support contract is overpriced and ineffective. When bugs are reported, support does nothing to escalate them to the development team. Issues with QuickBooks synchronization are met with the advice to enter transactions manually. Adding a single license is prohibitively expensive and tied into the already costly support contract.

Forced Dependency: We currently pay approximately $10k/year for support that is subpar at best. We were recently informed that dropping the support contract would disable critical integrations, such as those with QuickBooks and File Storage, which feels like a forced dependency rather than a service.

In conclusion, we can no longer recommend Fishbowl due to the persistent decline in product quality, misleading sales practices, and substandard support. The software no longer meets our business needs, and the cost of maintaining it far outweighs the benefits. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I like the price of Fishbowl and how well the push pull API works. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The software could be compiled better such as: adding more ways to filter date without pulling reports. Add the picking module to the calendar. add bill splits to the SO module. create a filter to sort SO priority in sales module. create a filter to sort by salesperson in the picking module. create a start and stop pick date and present on the calander. capability to manully split pick tickets in the picking module. It would be better for our industry if we had a software that was setup for job shops meaning more form and fuction then an inventory softeware but not as complex and expensive as the manufacturing module Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Once Quickbooks Desktop was discontinued for support we were forced to switch to Quickbooks online. Unfortunately that didn't offer us the ability to generate Sales Orders, ship small packages or effectively maintain inventory. With Fishbowl - integrated with Quickbooks online, we are able to quote a customer, generate a sales order, pick/ pack/ ship via small packages and generate a Bill of Lading for LTL shipments. Our inventory is now always correct. The workflow is easy and intuitive, we use it every day. The implementation process was great, we had a dedicated trainer who video-chatted with us for weeks before we went live. There's also a mobile app that allows you to do most functions remotely. We searched for over a year before landing on this product and glad we did! Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

If I had any complaints, it would be on the reporting side - some included reports could stand to be more customizeable but you can always get custom report templates made from customer support. The truth is that I can also get all of my reports in quickbooks online anyway so it's far from being a dealbreaker! Fishbowl also said there are many updates coming this year and i'm sure this will be one of them. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.