Fishbowl Think Tank: Fishbowl & QuickBooks 2011 Releases

Welcome to a new series of blog posts on the Fishbowl Inventory Blog I call the Fishbowl Think Tank. In these blog posts I’ll pick the brains of Fishbowl’s designers, managers, customer-service specialists and anyone else who has interesting insider information on Fishbowl and its products. I sat down with Kevin Batchelor, a Fishbowl product manager, for this exciting first installment. He shared a lot of cool things about the upcoming release of Fishbowl 2011. I’m getting ahead of myself, though. New QuickBooks 2011 Features Since we welcomed the long-awaited release of QuickBooks 2011 earlier this week, I’ll compare and contrast the QuickBooks 2011 release with the upcoming Fishbowl 2011 release. QuickBooks 2011 finally solved a variety of problems that QuickBooks users have struggled with for a long time. It added a Google-type search feature to make it much easier to find reports and other information. It also improved QuickBooks’ inventory management features, such as inventory tracking and adjustments. New Fishbowl 2011 Features While Intuit saved up all of its new features for the QuickBooks 2011 release, “Fishbowl releases new features as they’re finished, not in one big release at the end of the year,” Kevin said. Because Fishbowl is constantly improving its software throughout the year, Kevin said he sees Fishbowl 2011 as a culmination of a whole year’s new features, not just the ones they’ve been working on since the July release of Fishbowl 2010.6. Here are some of the new features that will debut in Fishbowl 2011:

• New icons to give Fishbowl a more user-friendly look and feel.
• Users can create a favorites list of their most-used reports to make them easier to access.
• Users can rename and move reports, and add and remove columns on some reports.

One of the biggest changes coming up for Fishbowl 2011 is in its warehouse features. Cycle counting has been added to Fishbowl Mobile Warehouse (FMW). This allows users to count their inventory using a mobile computing device. FMW will also see the addition of a pack module. This new feature allows users to quickly prepare items for shipment by scanning part numbers and tracking data. The old, cumbersome tag feature has been removed from Fishbowl 2011. While Fishbowl’s custom tracking tool still allows customers to track tags, it is now more flexible and much easier to use and set up, Kevin said. For a list of all of the features Fishbowl has added to its software since the 2010 release, visit the Fishbowl Release Notes page on our Wiki. Big thanks to Kevin Batchelor for lending his expert knowledge to this blog post. Keep coming back to the Fishbowl Blog for more installments of the Fishbowl Think Tank and other fun updates.