Avis clients sur Fishbowl

Avantages

Fishbowl offers and unparalleled ease of use. Our whole team was trained and up and running in hours. You simply won't find another software package with the range of features and reliability at this price range. It easily bests other software packages costing 3 times what Fishbowl costs!

Inconvénients

Their call back support could be a little faster, but it's still likely better than most software companies.

Avantages

I'm an Advanced QuickBooks Pro Advisor and I specialize in Inventory set up and management. I haven't found any program with as many capabilities at such a low cost range as Fishbowl. Netsuite can handle what Fishbowl does but can easily go into the hundreds of thousands to setup and get started and I found the process very complex. Fishbowl on the other hand, can import from QuickBooks and have you set up and running in just a few minutes, though I stress that this should be used as test only. To accurately use Fishbowl it can take months to setup and learn properly. This largely depends on your current experience with technology, accounting practices and inventory knowledge.

Inconvénients

The support isn't stable. Depending on your time zone, you'll get a different team. Some zones, depending on the day and time, will pick up your call immediately and be very knowledgeable and helpful. Others will take a day to get back to you and you'll get someone who's only been there a few months but will confidently tell you something as fact and you might find our later they don't actually know what they're talking about. However, the online wiki is very detailed so if you're someone who can figure out things on your own, this will be a huge help. Basically, I've found that most people who complain about Fishbowl are really complaining about inventory, which is hugely complex. But if you're a detail oriented company with personnel who don't cut corners, Fishbowl can be an excellent fit for you. Just don't expect it to be easy!

Avantages

The support team is always ready to dive into your database file and find the root cause of issues in your environment.
Serialization and product tracking is very functional and allows us to obtain important history on each item sold
Reports have high customization options and with a little SQL programming knowledge you can virtually get any information you are looking for out of the database.

Inconvénients

Growing pains in the earlier years of Fishbowl was a little difficult but many of these have gone away after they switched from Firebird to MySQL platform.
It is a little expensive.

Avantages

Fishbowl is a simple but robust solution and meets our requirements from order entry and order fulfillment at our Headquarters and manufacturing facilities. It integrates with Salesforce via a API and is continually improving. The Fishbowl Plug-in team specifically Jacobi Sardoni is great to work with as they focus on the problem, help you resolve it and educate you on the way. Over all very professional in their efforts. Thank you!

Inconvénients

From a sales perspective, the Salesforce API was initially limited but has gone through some major revisions to become a more robust API we can trust. Their are still some features that need to be improved relative to fulfillment.

Avantages

The customer support is great. It's just hard to get a hold of them when you need to speak to a live person on the phone. The people who work there are the nicest and most helpful when you do get to talk to them and they do resolve the day to day issues that pop up. ie, inventory getting stuck in committed status is a pretty quick fix, but then again, should it really happen in the first place?. Bigger problems take more time to fix, but they seem to keep working on it until its resolved. The people they have providing training are excellent.
The wikis are pretty easy to access and are pretty good

Inconvénients

This year the updates seem to break something that's had been working. Then it takes hours with customer support to fix and get going again.
The phone support team could use more staff because it does take hours to get a call back. The reports are difficult to customize, you have to know programming. There is no simple report writer function or a reports that can be customized.
If you have to pick inventory from two locations for one sales order, it will create two invoices. There is no way around that in Fishbowl. The calendar is pretty basic, could use enhancements. The inventory export CSV file does not use FIFO, but average costing. So if you use FIFO or any other method other than average costing, you have to use a different report instead of getting the data in CSV format.
The shipping module is frustrating and the way it is set up does not allow us to use carton count efficiently, so we have to change the packing list after it's printed. If you want Fishbowl to count the cartons for you, you have to add each carton manually. And if you do that, it will not total or summarize the number of cartons you have, it will list each one individually. So you could have a packing list that could be several pages long.
The UPS integration used to be great and then UPS updated, Fishbowl did not support the updated software and we had to change to UPS Worldship. Definitely a step backwards because the old integration worked beautifully. Now it's more manual and cumbersome.

Avantages

Ease of Quickbooks Online integration, ease of cost analysis

Inconvénients

Reports are not as easy to manipulate as some programs

Avantages

A knowledgeable support team and a WMS with many advanced features needed if an inventory management system.

Inconvénients

Overall, all good. But, plugins could be a bit more affordable to purchase.

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

The versatility of viewing and tracking inventory the way we wanted to.

Inconvénients

It lacked accounting software that we needed.

Avantages

Part and product searchability is excellent for companies with lots of sku's
POS functionality is OK, but not super.

Inconvénients

Instability: Crashes several times a week - usually have to have a call with support at least once a week
Poor accounting integration - QB integration is not as seamless as advertised.

Very inefficient: Simple tasks take a long time. all the needed information on a part/product is stored in three separate tabs. For example: you cannot find, List price, cost price, and current inventory in one place.

Quirky errors all over the place - discounts disappearing, invoice dollar amounts changing after being posted to QB.

Issued orders randomly deleted from the system

required items don't show up in the Auto-PO reports

Reporting functionality is exceptionally rigid and often unhelpful

lack of drill-down information

huge wait times for technical support

Mistakes cannot be corrected after posted to FB

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

Encrypted credit card capture to charge recurring clients
Stores pictures of the products that we sell
Easy to add parts and products
Lots and lots and lots of reports--- I don't think I've even opened half of them yet!
I like how many features it has even though I don't use them all... it makes me think "When I get that far, then I can use this software to {fill in the blank} it's nice to know I literally have no limitations

Inconvénients

I haven't found anything yet!

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

Search function is amazing! Really like Fishbowl for the most part. Ordering, inventory tracking, automatic updating, etc.

Inconvénients

1) Can't look at a part and see how many times it was ordered easily. Have to go in and out of the purchase orders. Would like to look at a part, see how often it was ordered and from whom, how many were ordered and how much we paid in a simple list form. Right now I only see the PO/Vendor without any of the important details like quantity ordered and cost.
2) I also think the Revision for an item should follow the part. It does not. There is a revision field that shows up on the purchase order, but doesn't print anywhere AND is not the same field from the Part Detail screen. In a manufacturing environment the revision for any given part should follow the part around the database, including onto purchase orders so the vendor knows what to fabricate. Right now I have to manually enter the revision on the vendor screen. The revision from the Part Detail screen should automatically populate on the Vendor screen for said part so that when the item is ordered, it appears on the purchase order .
3) I find the documentation sometimes lacking detail.
4) I'd also like to be able to create custom reports myself and without turning back the hands of time and forcing Java to use an old revision (required for iReport). A report creation function in Fishbowl would be awesome! Even my archaic old Parts & Vendors software allowed me to do create custom reports.

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

Fishbowl is a great company to work with! They are a solutions based company that strives to take the input of their customer. When we first implemented Fishbowl Inventory Software three years ago, we utilized their on site training to help assist with the setup and initial training. They don't just provide a cookie cutter approach to their support and training, they realize they work with all types of industry and have been able to adapt their software to work in nearly every need for inventory related purposes. Their software is easy to use, better than a DOS based system, and has great user interface for easy training of employees.

Inconvénients

Fishbowl is very good at answering your questions and their tech support. Sometimes you have to leave a message and they have to return a phone call, however it is in a timely manner, and they generally have a solution prior to calling you back, getting your issue resolved in a timely manner. Their "live chat" on their website is a good alternative if they are unavailable by phone and your question just can't wait.

Avantages

Inventory Tracking is the biggest thing. Easy of use with Sales Order and Purchase Orders. It sends my accounting info to Quickbooks automatically at the end of the day.

Inconvénients

Set up was a little time consuming. It took some effort to get everything in properly and just adapting to the new software functionality.

Avantages

One of the team members was my point of contact for our recent issue. We started upgrade at close of business and ran into issue late in the night. The upgrade process had been test driven successfully on the new target servers prior but something in the tag data at the moment of upgrade caused a failure. We opened for business the next AM dead in the water. They were excellent in his handling of the issue and giving it the attention we needed as our business was on hold due to the issue. The DB Tech that worked on the problem was also on point in the solving of the issue.

Inconvénients

Only cure for bugs is full upgrade. Given that we have many custom reports it does not make it an easy option. Would like to also see support for iReport as it is bundled with your product but discontinued on it's own. Lastly, would like to see a solution that would create true "Admin" level accounts. We have in house admins that get all rights but cannot affect "Company" (and other misc) settings without using the factory "Admin" account.

Avantages

The user interface allows new users to become proficient quickly. The ability to incorporate bar codes and product images is helpful. It is a great substitute for the Inventory module of QuickBooks if you need to do a lot of kitting and assemblies as well as calculating landed costs for imports.

Inconvénients

Report writing/modifying is cumbersome. End user is captive to Fishbowl or 3rd party authors. There should be more flexibility akin to Quickbooks for users to add/subtract columns of data as well as filtering by multiple criteria. Most filters are all/everything or just one Customer, Vendor, Part Number, etc. We also had to have custom reports created for some very basic inventory management reports - FB's main purpose. More end user input should have been/should be sought
EDI implementation is possible, but through 3rd party providers and automating order processing is limited.

Avantages

Fishbowl has been a good fit for our company so far. Learning a new software is almost like learning a new language, so it does take time to get to know all the features and understand how this software was designed to "think". This is where Customer Service comes in... and this is where Fishbowl shines. They have GREAT people on staff that are always willing to make the time to give you the training or the help you need. On rare occasions, they don't have an answer right away and will have to get back to me, but they always get back to me with an answer to my questions.
We also had a problem with a glitch in the software, and after letting our Fishbowl rep know, it was fixed with the next upgrade. Woo! Hoo!
Our main purpose is getting Fishbowl was to have the ability to track lot numbers, and Fishbowl has given us that ability.
We like that we are able to track multiple delivery dates on a single PO as well. We've not been able to do that in the past.
My biggest brag on Fishbowl though is their outstanding Customer Service. They don't sell their product then leave you on your own to figure it all out. They've been with us every step of the way and have taught us much.

Inconvénients

The most difficult part of Fishbowl has been using the Reports. We haven't quite figured out how to utilize them to pull the information we need. But I believe this is because the needs of our particular business aren't the needs of most companies. We also have the option to have custom reports made for those particular needs.
Some of the formatted reports do not include grand totals.

Avantages

We really like the data transfer capabilities with an API interface from our website order platform, and the data push into Quick books on the back end. So much time has been saved from manual data entry duplication. The ability to have multiple users from all over with remote hosting allows sales reps from TX to MT to place orders and see inventory availability prior to order placing. Having the opportunity to write our own I-reports to meet our specifications.

Inconvénients

We haven't been able to make mobile applications work yet for our systems. We still have challenges with the real time tracking of inventory between locations with using bar-codes, scanners and mobile devices.

Avantages

The program is intuitive and extremely in depth. We a food manufacturer (coffee roaster) and we invoice through Fishbowl. We are not yet using the mobile app, so I can't talk about that. Unlike our accounting system (brand Q), one module smoothly integrates with the next. It is easy to administer and our users just get it. It is the standard by which other database systems should be measured. The integration with Quickbooks is painless. Fully automated and has never, never failed. I have not had one single

Inconvénients

Their chat support isn't the most knowledgeable. They do have the option of custom fields, but there isn't the option to make some fields visible/invisible. The server occasionally locks up, however, all you need to do is restart. No fuss.