Marg Fishbowl

Quickbooks integration is OK. Could use more flexibility in product/service/class account mapping but overall it does the job. The software works pretty well about 98% of the time.

Software is sometimes slow and buggy. Support has no direct phone numbers, no way to get a hold of anyone except email, which they take weeks to answer, if they even answer. Support will literally never answer the phone, so you have to call sales who also often don't answer the phone. If they don't know how to answer your question they'll just ignore it forever. Fishbowl Go is absolutely useless if youre picking high volume as it doesn't work for group picking, so forget about paperless. No support for barcode scanning pick items for verification (the solution they do claim to offer is laughable. Broken, useless plugins that they will fight tooth and nail to refund even though they use blatant false advertising and gimmicky, slimey sales tactics to sell in the first place. The price per additional user is astronomical, and so are the yearly update fees.

Fishbowl itself does an ok job as a softwrae. It will improve your workflow and efficiency if you're coming from using quickbooks.

This program might work for a company that is all in one location, but I have several remote employees - this did not serve my business needs as I had hoped.

Technical support was lacking in knowledge and not always available for scheduled training; delivery of barcode scanners was not timely, couldn't customize the way I wanted to. Took five months to get the system mostly running, then when I tried to return the product because I was tired of the aggravation, they told me I was out of the return policy period and I had to involve my lawyers. Not good customer service at all.

Stay on top of the 30 day return policy, if you have any doubts what so ever, CANCEL IMMEDIATELY. The management will try to make it difficult for you to make that decision within the 30 day period.

I wanted to be able to see my inventory in real time, QB's online cannot do that. No benefits from this product, just aggravation.

It had a lot of advanced features, which, if set up and used correctly, could make a business more organized and proficient.

Fishbowl is a very misleading company that does not have the customers best interest in mind. The software layout is quite difficult to navigate and understand. It claims to integrate well with Quickbooks, but you will constantly find things which are not transferred. They give you a demo bike company system to start out with, but no instruction on how to start a fresh company or to connect it with quickbooks. We also came across a "bug" in their system which doubled our customers grand totals on sales orders & invoices. Customer service has unwilling to try and make things right. We attempted to get our money back after 45 days and are not being heard. Fishbowl does not care about their customers, after they are past their (hidden 30 day return policy. Save yourself the stress & find another company.

I would not recommend switching to fishbowl with an established company. It may work better if starting from scratch, but I wouldn't risk the merge of data.

None, it only created more.

It allows us to more easily track what is being manufactured and to make work orders that can go through the factory with the product as it is being made. Sales order entry is pretty easy.

Things I hate about Fishbowl -

- Their tech support. When you're selling a product that someone is going to run their entire company with, you'd better have outstanding tech support. Not so with Fishbowl. Their chat support staff are next to useless unless one of their canned responses helps out. Don't count on them unless you have an easy problem that you could figure out on your own unless you had to. If you need remote assistance, the chat people can't help out there either. You'll need to call the phone support and wait your turn.

- You can't customize it. Our salesperson told us of all the super awesome features that Fishbowl would do. Once we started setting it up, we found out that most of them cost between $300 and $1000 extra to use. You can't even customize a report to your liking. You've got to pay them to do it.

- Shipping. Shipping is a giant pain in the a**. We bought their $1000 ShipExpress plugin to make it easier. Ha! Not so much. ShipExpress works fine if you're shipping a single package per order because it will only print one UPS label. If you're shipping more than one box, you've got to use the Fishbowl shipping option. Unless you're shipping UPS 3rd party or Internationally. Then you've got to use UPS Worldship. Sound confusing? It is.

- Finance. You're still stuck with Quickbooks as well. Now you've got to maintain and be good at running two programs.

- Their updates. Every time a new update comes out, be prepared to limp along for a few days because something is pretty well guaranteed not to work for a while.

- The server. Be ready to have to restart the server, kicking everyone out of Fishbowl every week or so. It seems to be the best way to fix access issues.

I'd say don't do it. Save your money until you can afford a proper ERP.

The learning curve is so steep and the support is so poor, we're basically doing things the same way we did with Quickbooks, just using Fishbowl.

Its potential. Can be a great program, and used to be, but too many bugs in newer versions.

We experience daily glitches in the software, ever since they migrated to a mysql database. We use their mobile app to pick orders, which is great in theory. We experience problems with picks daily and have to call their tech support to remove the corrupt orders from the database. We give them feedback and thoughts on when and why these errors occur and they don't seem to care to address the problem. It's been nearly a year and nothing has been resolved. We've been loyal to them since 2014, but the quality of the software has gone down hill. Their support staff is seriously lacking as well, and is a cause of much frustration. If you stick to only using their client, you'll probably be fine. If you use their mobile app, which is an ADDITIONAL charge, mind you, you will probably face similar problems to what we are experiencing.

If you want to pick orders via mobile, do not use. They're mobile app cannot handle simple requirements. If you stay on a computer client only, you're probably fine.

Good inventory management in theory and the program is powerful, but for us, it is causing us so much headahche we've begun to look for alternate solutions. Software bugs are cause daily disruptions to our business.