Fishbowl

Avantages

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

Inconvénients

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.

Avantages

Inventory and parts/products are easy to access.

Inconvénients

The accounting/integration process. Customer statements don’t accurately reflect their account status. Credits not included and can’t be applied per remittance.

Alternatives envisagées 

Pourquoi choisir Fishbowl 

Logiciel antérieur 

Pourquoi passer à Fishbowl

Avantages

The support staff are very patient with me and my concerns.

Inconvénients

The lack of customization and flexibility to fit the needs of customers.

Alternatives envisagées 

Pourquoi choisir Fishbowl 

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Avantages

Ease of usage and ability to be flexible with our operations. We run custom electrical panels and this allows us to use the Bill of Materials module as a base, and add/delete parts in the Manufacturing module for the customs.

Inconvénients

Some reports are not readily available and have to find work-arounds. Like annual part usage to date. I can't seem to find or modify a report that will tell me how many of a certain part I have used that is filtered by dates.

Alternatives envisagées 

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Avantages

Having just begun using Fishbowl we are just getting started in appreciating all the functionality that it provides. A major factor is the ability to track lot numbers as well as serial numbers of our products. The implementation process was smooth and the training provided was excellent.

Inconvénients

The addition of items to sales orders and purchase orders is different than previous experiences.

Alternatives envisagées 

Pourquoi choisir Fishbowl 

Logiciel antérieur 

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Avantages

Great for a small manufacturing company.

Inconvénients

Not as robust for a large manufacture less options

Avantages

Compatibility with Quickbooks and ability to do both Inventory and accounting.

Inconvénients

Weird connection between Parts and Product. Doesn't always correlate. Very confusing.

Avantages

Ability to track vendors and other backend data.

Inconvénients

Communication from the company itself. Continual non responses to concerns from everyone from sales people to managers. Quite surprising.

Alternatives envisagées 

Pourquoi choisir Fishbowl 

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Avantages

The switch from BoxStorm to Fishbowl has been fairly seamless.

Inconvénients

So far, the inventory valuation report is not able to filter by "tags" and the location.
The emailing PO option does not have a savable "standard" message.

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

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

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

Inconvénients

Support.
Lacking in features for manufacturing processes.

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 

Pourquoi passer à Fishbowl

Avantages

Fishbowl works for our business and is easy to leanr to use.

Inconvénients

Sometimes response time can be longer being in EST time zone

Avantages

Pricing and affordability. Extensive training not required for all employees.

Inconvénients

Plug-ins not working. spent countless hours fixing Plug-in issues. Then we had to dish out another 6k for sellware after we already paid for the original plugins. Not a way to do business.!

Alternatives envisagées 

Pourquoi choisir Fishbowl 

Logiciel antérieur 

Pourquoi passer à Fishbowl

Avantages

Our implementation Specialist was absolutely incredible. When you has this level of customer support, implementing was a breeze. I don't know that we ever had a question that he could not answer.

Inconvénients

There are some reporting barrier on canned reports that is a bit frustrating, but I am sure there are work arounds for those.

Avantages

Inventory system is intuitive. Ability to assign access right to users.

Inconvénients

Manufacturing module is cumbersome
Sometimes product updates disable features that were available before, such as a couple of years ago, we could be looking at a part and hit the "To Inventory" button and be able to adjust quantities. Now only those who are able to create parts have the "To Inventory" button available. I want almost everyone to be able to adjust inventory levels, but next to no one able to create parts. The "To Inventory" button should have its own permission access right.

Avantages

I found it easy to understand and program

Inconvénients

I found in the beginning, years ago when I started working with the customer support teams, I was able to figure out the answer and programming before the support worker and I taught them something. We were all learning together.

Avantages

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.

Inconvénients

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.

Avantages

System service people very good!!
Account manager SUCKS!!! When I told him your price increased 48% I wanna know what makes so much different of your service for this big rip-off. He said I confirm the price and signed the contract not like I didn't know!! I answered : if I did notice price different between $3000 to $4500 after 3 years I will be a very pissed off customer. You can't treat your customer like shit just because we didn't notice! He said : the contract signed......

Inconvénients

Price increased like crazy!!! 48%. I am with Fish bowl more than 10 years, after this rip-off price increased I will not be their customer every again.

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

I love how it can do so many things. There are so many different settings and options to accommodate your experience..

Inconvénients

I do feel like training will never stop because there is so much to learn.

Avantages

Ease of use and navigation. Processes are easy to learn and remember once you learn them.

Inconvénients

It looks a bit outdated compared to other systems I've used. Brainstorm training was very fast and the videos had to be watched multiple times they were so fast. They're very basic and short.

Avantages

I like that it would allow us to keep an acuate inventory if it actually worked.

Inconvénients

Integration to QuickBooks is horrible. And getting support for any issues takes a long time. Then you do get a person, it's very time consuming.