Fishbowl Inventory Software Review: Pros & Cons, Features

We actually did quite a deep dive into the progarm and were pretty convinced until we came to the Shopify integration. They have a Shopify integration but it is very inflexible. The system will map order fields from Shopify into corresponding, pre-set fields in Fishbowl. However, we could not extract the needed data from those fields. We worked with their support team to see if there was any customized mapping they could set up but there was no resolution.

Fishbowl is great in many ways but it just ended up not being a great fit for us. The integration with Shopify and Quickbooks is clunky. We have so many technical work arounds to make it work. The system is also more for large production of the same product. Our company never makes the same two items. We do custom jewelery. It is tedious having to get the system to recognize the individual components and part numbers.

The software is a great overall inventory/warehouse management system. It offers bin tracking, LOT, and SKU traceability, as well as expiration tracking (we are in the food industry). We had every intention of renewing with them but were blindsided by an over 40% increase in costs. This came as a shock because we made no changes to our requirements or users. As much as we like the software, we do not feel it is worth the increase and have had to look elsewhere.

Hands down the single worst experience I have had with an inventorying software. You are strong armed into an SaaS account when all you should need is a perpetual license if you are small and need little assistance…

We were looking for an inventory system to better understand where our inventory was going during our operations. After looking at a few, we ended up implementing the Fishbowl Inventory system.

Their sales team was helpful with setting us up with demos to really understand what our needs were from a program.

We felt Fishbowl was cost effective and allowed us to keep our current accounting programs which was a feature we wanted.

We were seeking a software to manage the enitre supply chain of both the R&D and batch formulation, but that could also easily integrate with our existing software (Quickbooks and Shopify). After reviewing several options we found Fishbowl the most integratable, as well as flexible to meet our specific industry standards. The cost was also inline with our expectations.

Fishbowl has actual live people working support. That is becoming a rarity in the tech space. I truly appreciate the way Madison handled and corrected our situation.

Fishbowl is the backbone of our company. It offers a lot of extendable features and plugins which allow it to handle various different trading partners, e-commerce functions, web sales and even corporate EDI connections! The support and training staff are very knowledgeable and patient and they will spend as much time as needed to resolve any issue you may have. We have a mixture of Windows PC’s and MacOS computers and, though Fishbowl is mostly aimed at PC’s, the staff are able to support both platforms pretty effectively. It’s a great choice for an entry level Inventory Management system, but it can carry you through years of growth too!

We have used Fishbowl for 7-8 years now. It does everything we need to do and is fairly intuitive to use. The support team is responsive and is able to resolve most issues immediately. You can’t beat the overall value of Fishbowl compared to other systems.

As the operations manager of a fast paced and rapidly growing home services company, software of any kind is last on my list. However with the current state of the supply chain, inventory became something we had to have to keep moving forward. We chose Fishbowl as our inventory control software and I couldn’t be happier. The software works incredible and Madison and the team were great to work with.

We added Fishbowl Inventory and this was a huge solution to our problems. It is very user friendly and accurate. It doesn’t allow a transaction to take place without proper inventory. We have five offices, and each is responsible for counting their inventory. Fishbowl Inventory allows us to see how accurate each location is counting and helps us to better monitor inventory. Creating sales orders is so fast and easy. I’ve saved so much time by using Fishbowl Inventory. We love the new software and would highly recommend it to anybody with any type of inventory to be accountable for.

The Technical Support through Fishbowl is wonderful. Kevin helped us tremendously while we were setting up and training our staff. They were extremely knowledgeable and very considerate to our needs. The technical support department of Fishbowl made learning and understanding the program as easy as they could. They made sure you grasped the concepts before they moved on, and also worked with you to make sure that you used Fishbowl in a way that worked best for your company. Their Fishbowl forum is also a valuable tool to use, for many of your questions are asked and answered on the site.

We looked at Fishbowl Inventory two years ago and felt that it did not have the capacity for our needs. Instead we opted for a 100k plus enterprise solution. After an additional 20k in customization we still did not have a software solution to manage our inventory, needless to say we jettisoned our investment and reinvestigated the market. We demoed three different inventory management software packages and actually purchased the least expensive one…Fishbowl Inventory Fishbowl has the most robust and technical sound solution for our needs. We have several locations with thousands of different products. We have found the technical support superb and the training thorough. We paid less than 10% for Fishbowl than what we did for our “nightmare” experience with the other enterprise solution.

Fishbowl is the perfect answer for our business. Part of our business requires inventory tracking, storage and fulfillment so it is essential we are able to pull information at any given time about any item or order. The reporting feature in Fishbowl makes this so quick and easy and our clients love the fact Fishbowl allows us to offer them monthly activity reports in many different styles. The ability and the ease of being able to integrate Fishbowl with QuickBooks for billing and vendor payments is a BIG plus. Personally, the best thing about Fishbowl is the tech support staff. They really know their stuff!

We moved away from Netsuite - it was too big for us (15 people) and Netsuite is very difficult to work with. So many promises. Fishbowl is easier to get around. Easy to search and filter. Easy to research a part. The problem is that it hangs almost daily and while tech support is great when someone answers, it can take 1 hr for them to answer. The people are in the US which is a huge improvement from Netsuite. I still like Fishbowl better.

We purchased inventory software from Fishbowl and then had an exceptionally difficult time implementing the software. We paid for a number of items that we have not received months later, went weeks without receiving responses from them during the implementation process, and were verbally promised things that they have walked back or denied entirely. Wost of all, because of their lack of responsiveness, they claim that we are not eligible for a refund on the software because we are past the time limit for the satisfaction guarantee. Integrations, services, implementation support, and custom reports were paid for and never received. The server has been down for long time periods (days at a time), credit card systems won’t integrate properly and the software crashes regularly on our machines.

Rather than try to do what is right and work things through, they have opted to take a hard line on this issue with no flexibility at all. We are now currently pursuing legal action. If you are considering using their products or services I would recommend in the strongest of language possible to not do any business with this company.

The product is only for the simplest of businesses. It is extremely difficult to configure for anything non-standard. The reports are poorly constructed. For example, a report that should be only 2-3 pages is 10-15 with very little info on each page. Data input is cumbersome.

Great overall product for mid-level Manufacturing & Distribution

My client purchased this software and it broke just about every day. DISCLAIMER: it is NOT compatible with Quick Books and they cannot be installed on the same server. Their support team is terrible and sales team is very predatory in nature. They are only after the money. As long as you paid, they will not help you and you will be stuck with them. There is no way to cancel the trial if you don’t like their product. Good luck if you give them your payment information.

I helped my CEO in selecting this product to replace our current software. Off the bat and because we know exactly which options we need to run our business, we listed some software requirements we couldn’t live without to the salesperson at Fishbowl. After he checked with his superiors, he assured us that they’re able to accommodate and if not, they will refund us our money if we canceled within 30 days. As the days dragged along, we were nearly into the third week without being able to test the system out after we had paid for it. We asked them to give us an extension on this trial period in case they couldn’t deliver on some of the necessities in the software. Long story short, they weren’t able to deliver on some aspects we needed, mainly, to have the previous balance for customers to show up on the invoices or receipts. Their fix was for us to download all the customer balances from QB, nightly, into a spreadsheet, remove all the parents, and upload that sheet into Fishbowl, etc. or for us to take payments in Fishbowl without the ability to apply a payment for multiple accounts. These two options, for anyone who does this for a living, knows that they’re not realistic. So one day before the 30 days were up, we asked them to refund out money as they couldn’t deliver on what was agreed upon. They started to play games, saying they already worked on a custom receipt and that would cost us over $3k. Please learn from our mistake. I will update this post routinely after we see our refund.

They have been horrible to work with. 3 months later and I still have a system I can’t use. They have done nothing they said they would!!!

This is overpriced and severely outdated! One problem after another this program disappoints. AND rather than fix the software, they “lease” you the software through a third party so you HAVE to pay in full even if you decide not to use Fishbowl. $20,000 down the drain. Don’t do it!! There are PLENTY of better options

It will connect with SolidWorks and with QuickBooks. It had all the features to be able to track source and certification of all parts, in order to satisfy the FAA about our Quality Control system.

We ended up going with FishBowl but are not overly satisfied with the outcome to be honest. It just has not been able to make things that much easier and has been a struggle to get the software to do what we need.

I don’t like that it doesn’t have templates so I have to manually enter in an item each time. It’s also not user friendly and doesn’t allow for easy searching by category. In fact, while it allows us to create categories for products, we can’t actually search by category. For example, I can’t search for categories such as medication versus office supplies The user license also doesn’t make sense because it kicks another user off if too many are on.

Fishbowl is a feature rich distribution and manufacturing add-on to QuickBooks. It’s an inexpensive robust solution for mid-sized companies.