Avis clients sur Fishbowl

Avantages

Fishbowl is a great asset to our company. It has been wonderful in helping us manage inventory for our warehouse and tracking errors. The customer support is always amazing. [SENSITIVE CONTENT HIDDEN] our representative is one of the most helpful people. He goes above and beyond to make sure we are satisfied with the product.

Inconvénients

Some reports cost extra, but I understand that it takes them time to write it. The turn around is usually fast.

Avantages

Excellent onboarding and training. All the professionals I have worked with have been extremely knowledgeable and helpful.

Inconvénients

The cost per concurrent user is a little high in my opinion.

Alternatives envisagées 

Odoo, NetSuite et Katana Cloud Inventory

Pourquoi choisir Fishbowl 

Needed a more up-to-date, cloud-based solution.

Logiciel antérieur 

Pourquoi passer à Fishbowl

Better features for the money; support options; time to implement was shorter than others

Avantages

It does 85% of what it should. Its functions are organized very well, looking past its archaic functions.

Inconvénients

Bugs, bugs, bugs. But most of all - Never getting resolution to deep technical issues. Surface-level issues of data entry are clearly support's bread and butter, but anything beyond that is guided out to a pasture to die of old age instead of being addressed.

Alternatives envisagées 

NetSuite

Pourquoi passer à Fishbowl

I did not choose; I was not involved in identifying/purchasing our ERP.

Avantages

We love the scalability and how the modules are integrated with one another increasing productivity and enhanced reporting functionality.

Inconvénients

I don't like that it does not differentiate a reship purchase order with a drop ship purchase order from an item costing perspective. In other words, if I place an order for material from my supplier, and have them ship it to my customer directly, the cost impacts my AVERAGE cost of the inventory in my warehouse even though it has not been physically received in and mixed in with previously purchased inventory.

Avantages

Keeps inventory counts great. Real easy to use for the most part.

Inconvénients

Can't back anything out if made mistake once it posts to QuickBooks.

Avantages

Integration support. Help downloading reports out of Boxstorm.

Inconvénients

Not sure why it wasn't an automatic upgrade to Boxstorm or once you signup it just automatically converts.

Avantages

The training was thorough and we felt well prepared to start using Fishbowl. The interface is very intuitive and easy to work with.

Inconvénients

I would love to be able to have more customization features....like reporting; customizing the packing slips/invoices

Alternatives envisagées 

Zoho CRM

Pourquoi passer à Fishbowl

cost and ability to have the services that we needed.

Avantages

The support & confidence of the team at fishbowl. The system is SO user friendly and high tech.

Inconvénients

That we didn't use it sooner. We were recommended it many times but were hesitant because of the cost.

Avantages

As a basic inventory and locationing system, and for simple shipping and sales orders it works okay. Would be great for a small startup.

Inconvénients

Complete lack of flexibility. There are a lot of workarounds that even our Onboarding expert had to use and setup for us. They do not make even the most obvious and simple improvements. You cannot update pricing from Woo to Fishbowl, and the Quickbooks integration is horrible.

Avantages

I like the way the BOM's are Set up, and the inventory is saving us a lot of headache

Inconvénients

The quoting system does not work for how we are setup

Avantages

I've used SAP and Oracle for previous companies, and Fishbowl is very easy to use and overall very intuitive. I enjoy using this system.

Inconvénients

Not able to store more than Scheduled Date per sales order. Some customers POs have multiple lines and different due dates per line. I'm unable to do the same and then partial ship and keep track of the order like on larger ERP systems. As far as I understand, Fishbowl is not capable of reporting OTD because there isn't enough date submission options.
It's frustrating not being able to highlight any text to copy and past in another location or for another program (Word, Excel). There are only a few places FB allows me to highlight and copy the info. The rest I'm unable to. Being able to highlight and copy anything would improve ease of use.

Alternatives envisagées 

ProShop ERP, Megaventory et Zoho Inventory

Pourquoi passer à Fishbowl

Zoho was cheap, but did not seem capable of putting locations for inventory which is critical for us. Megaventory is cheaper than Fishbowl, but did not seem capable of connecting multiple locations together easily. Our manufacturing center uses ProShop, but ProShop does not seem to have great a inventory management software. Fishbowl, though expensive, seemed capable of doing all the things we would need it to do, so I was given approval to implement it and try it out.

Avantages

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.

Inconvénients

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?

Avantages

It handles sales order entry well throughout the manufacturing and shipping process. It also handles the purchasing of parts from different vendors extremely well. The Bill of Materials handles multiple levels of assemblies within assemblies very well.

Inconvénients

It has a lot of good pricing rules for all kinds of occasions. But it lacks last cost pricing for manufactured products.

Avantages

I liked the interface, the ease of use and how it synched flawlessly with Quickbooks.

Inconvénients

This is so close to being halfway decent software but there are just so many odd little quirks that keep it from really being a powerful tool. Just one example - if you move a piece of inventory that you've had in your warehouse for 6 months from row 1 to row 2, the aged date resets to zero. This makes it effectively impossible for you to track your aged inventory. If you want to look up a part that you don't have in stock, you need to do an advanced search, check a box that you're looking for something not in inventory and then search for the product. If you're looking up 10 products in a row that aren't in stock, you need to repeat those steps each and every time.

Alternatives envisagées 

NetSuite

Pourquoi passer à Fishbowl

A coworker liked it and I couldn't find anything wrong with it.

Avantages

Integration with our manufacturing process was easy. Purchases, Receiving, Bill of materials and Work Orders fulfilled our needs.

Inconvénients

Reports provided are too basic, no help documentation to create your own reports. If you need a detailed or custom reports you have to purchase them apart.

Avantages

Migration to SQL database allowing integration with other systems.

Inconvénients

After selling to a larger company, support is almost non existant, if your small thet dont seem to care. Have tried to book many support sessions and never any availability unless you want to wait 2+ months. Good luck getting them on the phone, the chat works and will waste an entire day trying to explain any issues

Avantages

I absolutely love that FB is easy to use and easy to teach. It has all the features that our company uses daily. Examples include customer pricing rules, customer "numbers" or customer sku's, Auto PO function, The import/export feature has been a God-send when we need to import products to our website or send information to our customers. The substitute feature is very helpful too. We also really love how we can create custom fields within every module. I really love how the FB team remembers our company when we call and goes above and beyond when we have a hiccup or questions. We can thank FB for some of our company's success. W/o being able to correctly track inventory and use it for daily operations, we wouldn't be operating at the level we are today.

Inconvénients

There aren't things that I like "the least" but there are things I wish FB offered/had that would help our type of business/company. This includes:
1) Since we are a product distributor, we provide a lot of our customers w/ "quotes." FB has the ability to create an "estimate" but no way to store it or look back at it for reference. Pricing rules are essentially only created in our line of operation when a customer begins buying a product. So, we have to create "quotes" on excel sheets and save them on our network folder. So it would be easier if it was all w/in FB. Or if there was a different section from pricing rules that you could make a pricing rule? If that makes sense
2) Wish we could customize reports that are staples of FB w/o paying high dollar. For ex. the packing slip should have a signature line or at least the option to include it. Or there should be options on layouts or what columns to include. Also, we've gotten feedback from customers on how they wish the item # and description where split into different columns.
3) If FB alerted a user if a sales order has been in the system for "x" amount of time. Like a dormant SO in FB
4) Be able to sort the packing slip. Ex. by Item #, customer #, item description, etc.
5) Had a UNSPSC code field. We've found that this is going to be an important code for future web sales.

Avantages

QuickBooks integration is probably the feature I appreciate the most about Fishbowl. Any small to mid sized business that is outgrowing QuickBooks inventory management features but doesn't want to pay the price of an all-inclusive ERP program targeted for larger corporations should consider Fishbowl Inventory. The ability to track inventory by location, assign multiple vendors to one item, create intuitive bill of materials items that are as simple or complex as you wish, add multitudes of pricing rules for your products and customers, assign reorder points and order up to levels for your parts to quickly reorder items that are low, Fishbowl plugins that connect to a wide range of third party programs, I could go on for a long time about what there is to like about this program. Their support has definitely improved over the years as well, with a response to a support ticket usually within the hour.

Inconvénients

One inherent weakness with Fishbowl is the QuickBooks export connection. Fishbowl has made tremendous improvements in this area since we first started using it, but there are still multiple times that we need to restart the connection before running an export. To be fair, this may be as much QuickBooks' problem as Fishbowl's. The software also tends to be buggy after new releases. Again, they have improved lightyears over what they were 8 years ago, but still be prepared to have some weird things happen occasionally when a software update is released. Also, Fishbowl only has rudimentary accounting functions and leaves the majority of accounting related tasks to QuickBooks. This can create accounting headaches and even nightmares if the wrong QuickBooks accounts are assigned to items in Fishbowl. I do miss the QuickBooks ability to map transactions directly to expense accounts. In Fishbowl, you must create an item and then map it to the correct QuickBooks expense account, which again asks for accountant's nightmares.

Avantages

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.

Inconvénients

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.

Avantages

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.

Inconvénients

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!

Avantages

It's great if you are manufacturing the same thing over and over, so you need 500 or 1000 widgets made the same way. It's a pretty powerful tool for warehousing and inventory. It costs for just the warehousing, plus users and add-ons. They'll give you a discount if you ask them, but you almost should just go with a saas program you'll get quicker updates. fishbowl you can save lots of money down the road if you don't buy there support package. They have a pretty good product development team, but it takes them at least a year it seems like to roll out any useful new features you talk to them about.

Inconvénients

Very challenging to set up, learning curve is huge in my opinion. The BOM stages work for the most part, but you'll spend a lot of time in a sandbox database seeing if what you want works (if your doing multi stage builds) If your doing 1 to 100 of anything, and what your making varies order to order, I'd recommend some other software like ordoo, shopvox, or corbridge. They are alot quicker to set up on the

Avantages

The 2016 front end looks slick. There is an API, but it will cost you more to hire a progammer to figure out how to integrate with it than to just get better softwate that plays better.

Inconvénients

THE SUPPORT IS HIDEOUS, THE MOBILE APP IS USELESS, SALESPEOPLE ARE LIARS

Avantages

The app is looking ok and easy to use, actually the only good thing I found and it took me a while to think about something.

Inconvénients

- Software looks from the 90’s
- CUSTOMER SERVICE IS DANGEROUS to this country. We all need to make sure companies like that are not existing in AMERICA.
- software is really hard to use
- not enough barcode sizes
- the set up guys are very unprofessional and doesn’t think out of the box
- the software is very square and can’t be customized AT ALL.
- TOO EXPENSIVE
- they really don’t care about their clients. But really. You can’t even imagine.

Avantages

Fishbowl is relatively easy to use (by nature, ERP systems are complex) and is relatively reliable for companies whose transactions number in the low hundreds per day. Their support is quite effective but may be slower than you like -- if your business is effectively down due to an ERP issue, the last thing you want to get when you call support is voicemail. Unless things have changed in recent (2017) releases, one must update the local client with each system update, and that can be problematic for small shops that do have centralized software management and have restricted local rights on their PCs. They did change from FireDB to MySQL late last year, which improved performance drastically, but the database still requires a lot of optimization, care and feeding in order to get peak performance. Eventually, the company I worked for decided that it had outgrown FBI and migrated to NetSuite.

Inconvénients

* Slow support response
* Relatively slow performance
* Cannot cancel running batch jobs
* They recommend(ed) running Quickbooks and Fishbowl on the same server, which meant an extremely expensive server was required. The alternative was to split the two apps onto different machines and experience super-slow batch updates (some ran hours)

Avantages

When Functional, it is a good software. Order Management, fulfillment, inventory updates, accounting integrations are all great. keyword is WHEN it functions properly.

Inconvénients

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.