Getting Up and Running

Griffiths Plumbing and Bath sells more than 3,600 parts and products. Because they had spent so many years managing inventory on paper and in Excel spreadsheets, it took four months to get all of their inventory data organized into a CSV file to import into Fishbowl Inventory. Now that they’ve put forth the initial effort to get the system up and running, they’re starting to see positive results.

Tracking Costs

“The part that really excites me is the information that is available to me now,” Damon Griffiths says. “I now have access to information that helps me manage my cash flow better. I can track so many different things.”

One of the most important things Griffiths is now able to track is the cost of equipment and parts that his plumbers use when they go out and work directly with customers. That way, he knows whether or not he’s charging enough to cover the cost of all the supplies and labor that go into on-site jobs.

As the company tracks costs and optimizes inventory levels, it will be able to grow faster than ever before. And, more importantly, it will keep its loyal customers happy.

Looking to the Future

Fishbowl is in the business of helping businesses succeed. If your business is ambitiously trying to grow into new markets or simply interested in carving out a local niche, you’ll find that Fishbowl Inventory is a great solution for a great price. Keep your business thriving for the next 80 years and beyond by using Fishbowl Inventory now. Sign up for an inventory software demo today to get started.

Some of the new features you’ll notice on the Web page include playlists, displayed video duration, and comment sections for each of the videos. These make it quick and easy to watch all of the videos in a specific category, make note of important parts of a video you want to return to, and ask questions or offer feedback.

The videos are now organized into nine categories. I’ll list them and briefly describe what you’ll learn in each of them:

• Setup: Setting up Fishbowl Inventory, integrating with QuickBooks, importing and exporting CSV files, and setting user rights.
• Part: Using the Part Module, creating parts, and setting auto reorder points.
• Purchasing: Creating new vendors and purchase orders.
• Product: Building a product tree.
• Sales: Adding new customers and sales orders, as well as shipping via sales orders.
• Picking: An overview of the picking process.
• Manufacturing: Setting up bills of materials and work orders.
• Transfer Order: Creating and using transfer orders.
• New Features: Right now this includes a walkthrough of the new Calendar Module, and it will continue to grow as Fishbowl releases new features.

Be sure to check out Fishbowl’s training videos. Whether you’re a current user or you’re curious if Fishbowl Inventory is right for your business, you’ll gain a wealth of knowledge from them. And once you’ve seen our software in action, you should sign up for a free trial to start using it for yourself.

She does a great job covering Fishbowl Inventory’s features and explaining inventory management concepts, so I’ll let her do most of the talking in this blog post and throw in my two cents as needed.

Baker is a much more prolific writer than me. She’s written for newspapers like The New York Times and Knight Ridder, magazines like ComputerWorld and Institutional Investor, and websites like CIO.com. She’s been around the block, digitally speaking. So it’s no surprise that she has a lot of interesting things to say about Fishbowl Inventory 2012.

How Fishbowl Tracks Inventory

Baker begins by giving a quick overview of how Fishbowl Inventory helps businesses keep track of their inventory:

“You can tell, for example, that you have 15 widgets in Warehouse A, 30 in Warehouse B, 50 en route to Retailer XYZ, one under your desk and three that your top salesmen are currently carrying around for demonstrations. The system can track inventory by nearly any criteria such as lot numbers, expiration dates, revision labels and serial numbers or any combination thereof.”

That’s inventory tracking in a nutshell. Wow, she just started, and I’m already impressed by how concisely she explains complex ideas. Excellent.

Reordering Products with a Click

The main purpose of tracking inventory is to make sure you always have enough products in stock to meet demand. And when it’s time to reorder products, Fishbowl has a way of making that easier.

“If you find that the total number of widgets on hand is too low, you can reorder widgets, or the raw materials to make the widgets, from approved vendors in your system. You can rank the vendors according to any preference you wish from price points to delivery reliability. Reordering is thus simplified to a click.”

That’s a really cool feature – being able to rank suppliers based on different factors that are important to you. If you’re willing to pay a little more for the peace of mind that comes from a supplier who always does the job right, then you can put the most dependable ones at the top of the list. Or if price is the most important factor, you can adjust for that, as well.

Integration with Multiple Systems

A big reason why Fishbowl Inventory works so well as an inventory management solution is that it joins so many systems together into a comprehensive solution. From warehouse management to fulfillment processes to back-end accounting, all of it connects through Fishbowl.

“The system integrates with FedEx and UPS so shipment weights are automatically entered from the warehouse data,” Baker says. “Contact info, shipping address, and shipping option (overnight, ground, etc.) are automatically ported from the sales form, and the shipping label is thus automatically generated. Invoicing is handled through integration with QuickBooks.”

In short, the whole picking, packing and shipping process in the warehouse (in addition to other inventory management processes) is much easier with Fishbowl’s automated system.

Ideal for SMBs

Baker mentions many other aspects of Fishbowl Inventory 2012 and comes to this conclusion: “This product is ideal for small businesses and smaller-end mid-market businesses with basic to complex inventory and asset tracking needs.”

Be sure to check out her whole article by clicking the link at the start of this blog post. And get an inventory software demo to see Fishbowl’s powerful inventory management tools in action.

Growth

Chris Redgrave, the host of the Speaking on Business Economic Update, starts by talking about Fishbowl’s humble beginnings and shows how CEO David Williams was able to turn things around in a hurry.

“[Williams] became the CEO of Fishbowl and helped prepare and launch the product [Fishbowl Inventory], which quickly gained traction as the most requested inventory management product for use with QuickBooks. Eight years later the company is now debt free and turning a healthy profit.”

Inventory Management Software

One of the biggest reasons for Fishbowl’s rapid growth is, of course, its amazing inventory management software, Fishbowl Inventory. Here’s how Redgrave describes it:

“Their inventory management software is so popular that companies of all sizes use the product as their business software front end. This software is built to fulfill a customer’s needs and is designed so companies will never outgrow it.”

Couldn’t have said it better myself.

Community Service

We haven’t let our success go to our heads. Fishbowl is committed not only to offering great inventory software to small and midsize businesses, but also to helping our local community be a better place to live and work in.

“In addition to their software, Fishbowl has launched the CAM initiative, or Courage Above Mountains, in remembrance of David’s son, Cameron. They provide programs for digital literacy and software certifications. Nice work, Fishbowl!”

I second Redgrave’s assessment. We’re working hard at Fishbowl to make sure our customers, employees and community stay happy and strong. To learn more about Fishbowl, sign up for a free inventory software demo today!

Pipeline is basically a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solution that integrates directly into Fishbowl Inventory’s software. Fishbowl Pipeline currently allows companies to keep track of:

• Leads
• Customer accounts
• Tasks
• Opportunities
• Other data through custom fields

We plan to continue adding new features to Pipeline in the future, based on Fishbowl customers’ feedback. So by signing up for Pipeline right now, you can actually help us mold this CRM into something even more useful to your business.

I hope you’ll join us on this adventure into a new, exciting world. Technology keeps improving, and Fishbowl is flexible enough to keep up with all of these new advances.

In its early forms, barcode tracking software could only be used by inventory holders to track their products. Today, however, the increasingly complex innovations in barcode tracking software now allow inventory holders to use their barcode software to easily create and publish inventory essentials such as:

• Bills of materials
• Work orders
• Other crucial production and work-related documents

Barcode tracking software makes it easy to perform and handle many formerly complex processes. No matter how much the software advances, however, barcode tracking software will always be essentially a tool to help companies avoid both premature depletion and overstocking of their products.

Most of the recent updates and advances to barcode tracking software have to do with simply increasing the software’s existing capabilities and user-friendliness. Some of them, however, offer the exciting possibility of adding brand-new features that have never been seen before in barcode tracking software. Here are this year’s most exciting innovations to barcode tracking software.

• More Data Available
• More Simultaneous User Access
• Real-Time Database Access
• Future Usage and Capacity Projections
• Storage Location Recommendations

1. More Data Available

At a single glance, the barcode tracking software of 2012 will be able to tell you not only the item number information of the product scanned but also any additional descriptive information that you wish to include. Although this capability has previously been available to only the highest-end and most expensive professional barcode tracking software, innovations in micro-technology, data storage, and data transfer will allow even the cheaper, lower-end barcode tracking software to provide this additional data to its users. The availability of additional data will allow for the elimination of the many steps involved in item and product cross-referencing.

2. More Simultaneous User Access

Most traditional barcode tracking software entities of the past have only allowed a single user to access the database at a time. Although this low degree of user-friendliness may be fine for small inventory businesses and simple operations, for larger companies, simultaneous multiple user access is essential.

This year’s barcode tracking software will allow many different users, including managers, CEOs, and even regular employees trying to find the pallets they were assigned to deliver, to all access the software’s database at the same time without conflicts. Users will also be able to update groups of items simultaneously with new mass update features.

3. Real-Time Database Access

This year’s barcode tracking software will be more up to date than ever with increasingly frequent real-time communication between the software and the items themselves. This feature is essential to industry niches like auto insurance and the anti-theft programs they use. The more often the barcode tracking software used by a car insurance provider or anti-theft program can communicate with, for instance, a stolen vehicle, the more chance there is that the vehicle will be recovered quickly and with the least possible amount of damages.

4. Future Usage and Capacity Projections

In the very near future, your barcode tracking software will be able to not only tell you when your storage is getting too full or too empty but it will be able to calculate and project trends in your storage fluctuations to help you structure and expand your business like never before. Using complex algorithms and ratios to track warehouse capacity, orders, and item usage, you will be able to project your average earnings for the next few years as well as calculate how much you may need to spend on replenishing your stock in, for instance, the year 2020.

5. Storage Location Recommendations

Because your barcode tracking software will soon know both your product inventory and your storage space better than you do, it will be able to offer you suggestions on the most efficient locations to store new shipments and products as they arrive. No longer will you have to rely on additional software solutions or even just your memory. Barcode tracking software is well on its way to becoming the complete warehouse management solution of the future.

Light years beyond the hard-copy inventories that used to break the backs of the warehousing industry before the days of barcode tracking software, this software has made possible the fine-tuned inventory business world of today. Although other technologies are fighting to push the beloved barcode out of the way, these recent and future innovations to barcode tracking software seem to indicate that this highly effective means of tracking and locating products plans to stick around for quite a while longer.

Right now, you can use Pipeline to track leads, accounts, contacts, opportunities and tasks. We plan to add a lot more functionality as time goes by, so expect Pipeline to grow into an even more useful tool for your business. In the meantime, enjoy this tutorial with Kevin Batchelor, Fishbowl’s Vice President of Product Development.

Lean Means More Green

Lean inventory management is all about cutting the fat out of your business and finding just the right balance between too much and too little inventory on hand. That means no more hoarding products just because you can get them cheaper by buying them in bulk, and no more guessing how many products to keep in stock.

You have to carefully weigh each decision to make sure it’s in your company’s best interest. As you do this, you’ll start to see something strange and wonderful happen in your business. You’ll save money and become much more efficient. All the money you were spending on slow-moving products will be able to be put to better use.

Imagine needing less storage space, fewer warehouse workers, and having faster delivery times. All of this is possible when you use lean inventory management.

Coming Clean

Now is the part where I come clean and show how to achieve lean inventory management. It takes hard facts and a constant stream of new data coming in to replace intuition and guesswork. The best way to gain access to all of this information (and to make it comprehensible) is to use QuickBooks inventory software.

QuickBooks inventory software is a combination of QuickBooks accounting software and inventory management software. When these two systems integrate with each other, they allow you to track product orders, sales, deliveries and much more. Then you can generate reports that show seasonal trends, which products sell well in different locations, and other insights. All of this helps you make smart decisions about what products and quantities to order.

Lean inventory management is something every business should aspire to. And it’s something every business can attain if they’re willing to put forth the effort. By using QuickBooks inventory software and putting inventory data to good use, you can save money and be more efficient.

Sign up today for an inventory software demo to see how your company can start benefitting from lean inventory management.

A New Approach to Inventory Management

Several developers have already joined the Fishbowl Developer Network and started finding new possibilities for Fishbowl’s software. One of these developers is Sharpe Concepts. They created an inventory app called LilyPad for Fishbowl, which allows people to enter orders into Fishbowl Inventory on tablets and smartphones. That means companies don’t even need to use barcode scanners or have access to a desktop computer to place orders anymore.

A Win for Wine Sellers

LilyPad is proving to be a valuable tool for businesses. Noble House Wines, a high-end wine seller in New York, started using the inventory app in August 2011, and they’re impressed with how it’s working. The company serves many of the most famous restaurants in the world, so Noble House Wines representatives always have to be professional and fast to keep up with their clients’ needs.

LilyPad helps them accomplish both of these tasks in style.

“Because the application runs on smartphones that the reps already had, they were up on the new system immediately,” says Ted Wilson, Director of Operations at Noble House Wines. “Wine connoisseurs appreciate technology, as well, and the use of smartphones has given the sales reps an image boost with their clients.”

Looking Good Where It Counts

In addition to looking good in front of customers, sales reps are able to improve the behind-the-scenes action with LilyPad. “Now orders go directly into the Fishbowl system without going through an order entry person in the office,” Wilson says. “The amount of errors has been cut to almost zero and the turn time is minutes.” This makes the company look really good where it counts – in its order fulfillment and customer service.

Instead of viewing inventory management as something that should only be left to specialists in the warehouse, sales reps can see what a powerful impact it has on their jobs.

Start using LilyPad’s inventory app on your tablet or smartphone by clicking the LilyPad for Fishbowl link above right now!

This is the first year the magazine gave out its SAMY Awards (which stands for Salespeople and Marketers of the Year). Twenty executives from some of Utah’s largest and fastest-growing businesses were on this list. In addition to Fishbowl, the businesses include Zions Bank, EnergySolutions, and Larry H. Miller Sports. That’s good company to be in.

The Importance of Online Marketing

Being a marketer myself, I might be a little biased about the importance of good marketing. So I’ll let the Utah Business article speak for me: “Sales and marketing professionals are often referred to as the lifeblood of a company’s success. In our inaugural SAMY awards program, we celebrate the sales and marketing gurus who have had a direct, measurable impact on their company’s bottom line.”

Right now is a great time to be in business. There are so many tracking tools and opportunities to collect data that a lot of the guesswork has been taken out of marketing. The success of Fishbowl’s online marketing efforts can be easily seen in its overall success in the past few years.

“Due in large part to Tanner’s remarkable use of pay-per-click tactics, careful attention to SEO and innovative social media campaigns, Fishbowl achieved 176-percent sales growth from 2006-2010 and was on target for 86-percent growth in 2011,” the article notes. “Additionally, the cost per lead was cut by 30 percent since the beginning of 2010.”

Planning Ahead

Of course, in order to get impressive results, you have to put forth a lot of effort. And Kirk is definitely up to the challenge. He’s a strategic thinker, and he’s always looking for ways to improve. Here’s how he describes it: “Most consumers view marketing as just the slick advertising, packaging, logos and collateral they see, not realizing the amount of science behind the final execution. There is a great deal of data collection and analysis that needs to be done to understand the market and target audience.”

Thanks to Fishbowl’s strong leadership and customer-centric focus, we continue to offer the best inventory management software for small and midsize businesses. Sign up for an online inventory software demo to see how it can help your business.