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Fishbowl Inventory

Score5.5 out of 10

20 Reviews and Ratings

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What is Fishbowl Inventory?

Fishbowl Advanced is the company's on-premises inventory tracking, warehousing, and manufacturing solution with hosted capabilities, offering real-time inventory visibility and control across all locations and order fulfillment for physical warehouses, on-the-go inventory, 3PL, or drop shipping.

Categories & Use Cases

Reviews

What users are saying about Fishbowl Inventory.
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Functional and affordable

Incentivized
Ed Thompson
Operations Manager in Corporate at Gavan Burke Enterprises, Inc. (1-10 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We are a wholesaler that supplies products to non-profits. We manage the shipment of those products. Each "bill to" may have multiple "ship to" addresses. Each client may ship to thousands of supporters. We import the orders and address data and ship the requested materials to the individuals, then aggregate the shipping data to bill the client.

Pros

  • Maintaining accurate inventory data
  • Integrating well with the supporting software
  • Accurate reporting

Cons

  • Allow easier customization of reports
  • Lower pricing on Plug Ins

Most Important Features

  • tracking inventory
  • receiving products
  • reporting

Return on Investment

  • efficient handling of products
  • reduced paperwork, accurate communication of data

Other Software Used

QuickBooks Online, Endicia, Microsoft 365 (formerly Office 365)

Fishbowl Manufacturing expands your view beyond just the fishbowl.

Incentivized
Bobby GreenawaltView profile
Founder & President in Corporate at Beverage Management (51-200 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use it for inventory management, manufacturing management, product and recipe management for procurement of individual ingredients, allocation, vehicle assignment, costs analysis, and event financials. This helps us move away from spreadsheets and move towards being in the 21st century. Fishbowl Manufacturing is applicable most to all industries. We were not able to use any other platform except for Fishbowl Manufacturing when it comes to what we needed from inventory management software.

Pros

  • Inventory Management.
  • Ingredient and Recipe Management.
  • Cost Control and Variation.

Cons

  • Useability is a little dated with the UI.
  • Linking some of their modules together that don't currently link
  • A quicker onboarding would be appreciated, but there is a lot to learn so I understand.

Most Important Features

  • Purchase Orders
  • Auto Purchase orders
  • Inventory Management
  • Cost analysis
  • Allocation
  • Recipes

Return on Investment

  • Positive: Decreased time spent on copy/pasting in spreadsheets.
  • Positive: Easier to analyze costs and guarantee efficiency.
  • Negative: Time to get it up and running is really difficult to work with.

Other Software Used

Asana, Tripleseat and Gather, Microsoft Teams

Get set Inventory

Incentivized
Verified User
Analyst in Research & Development (51-200 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Fishbowl's mission is to empower small and midsize businesses to oversee difficult business operations like inventory management and manufacturing with ease and at a low cost. Fishbowl is the most frequently requested production and warehousing management software.Fishbowl is a small and medium-sized business production and warehousing management solution. Material requirements planning (MRP), job shop floor control, work order administration, manufacturer orders, and bills of materials are all critical components.

Pros

  • Optimize cost
  • Material requirement Planning
  • Order Management
  • Inventory Optimization
  • Inventory turnover ratio

Cons

  • MRP
  • BOM creation
  • Unified interface

Most Important Features

  • Inventory Control
  • warehouse planning based on staffing and scheduling activities
  • In creating material requirement planning for effective inventory planning

Return on Investment

  • Intuitive functionality
  • unified dashboards
  • better integration

Alternatives Considered

Zoho Inventory

Other Software Used

Zoho Analytics, Microsoft Power BI, Tableau CRM

If you rely on accurate reports, Fishbowl is not for you

Incentivized
Verified User
Executive in Corporate (11-50 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Fishbowl for all our production, purchasing, and order processing. We use Fishbowl in conjunction with QuickBooks.

Pros

  • Bill of Materials
  • Inventory Management

Cons

  • Reporting: Many of the reports that are provided for free with Fishbowl are useless in the context of everyday manufacturing and production planning. Some reports provide inaccurate information. In order to use get useful and correct reports, outside developers must be paid (a new or modified report may cost anywhere from $150 to $2000)
  • Customer service can be hit or miss. In our experience, a knowledgeable person is rarely available, but for the most part customer service has no idea how real manufacturing works to provide reasonable answers to fix Fishbowl shortfalls.

Most Important Features

  • Integration with ShipStation for simplified shipping
  • Integration with QuickBooks

Return on Investment

  • Use of ShipStation simplified our shipments
  • Lack of accurate reporting added many unnecessary work hours

Alternatives Considered

QuickBooks Desktop Enterprise

Other Software Used

QuickBooks Desktop Pro

Fishbowl Review

Incentivized
Verified User
Director in Quality Assurance (11-50 employees employees)

Pros

  • Inventory control - provides easy/accurate reports. Also, cycle counts can be done at any time. The warehouse team was easily trained.
  • Sales Orders - Fishbowl allowed us to have the sales orders accessible to everyone and linked the customers' purchase order to the orders and work orders (within the system). It no longer needs to be manually linked.
  • Custom reports - for a small fee we had reports customized specifically for our company.
  • Link to Quickbooks - invoices generated directly after closure of sales order.

Cons

  • In some instances when the sales orders contain "non inventory items," it is difficult to split up these items (i.e. design contract items) once they have been put into the system. The work flow is not intuitive to know what needs to be backed out, etc. For example, if a sales order is placed with a contract for $1000 but the next day we need to bill out only $600 ($400 later) - the entire $1000 gets billed out and can't be retracted.
  • Shipping memos/packing lists - the link between the Quickbooks invoice number would be nice.
  • Adding files to the vendor/part area, so I don't need to go to our PLM system to get the files.

Return on Investment

  • Overall FBM has saved our company money. Our inventory is more accurate. Previously we used a home grown, Access data base. We have decreased our cost in the inventory/purchasing area by about 15%.
  • Our parts are easier to track in the system - from sales order/purchasing/work order/inventory.

Alternatives Considered

Arena

Other Software Used

Arena