Kendrick Hair is the Chief Technology Officer at Fishbowl. The company is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year. It’s helped to have quite a few members on the team who’ve been there for many years. Fishbowl’s customers and partners have also contributed a great deal of insights into how to improve the inventory management software.
The feedback Fishbowl’s Development team receives from customers isn’t always positive, but it always yields positive results. That’s because Fishbowl has a customer-centric solution that it’s constantly refining based on input from those it’s intended to benefit.
Fishbowl started as an inventory solution. Then it added QuickBooks integration, which has been hugely significant. It later added even more functionality via plugins and integrations.
What’s on the Horizon for Fishbowl Desktop
Fishbowl Desktop has been Fishbowl’s primary solution for many years. The Dev team is working on adding an Auto MRP wizard to help with forecasting and materials planning in new and exciting ways.
They’re also working on the Rest API and a Web-based client to increase mobile accessibility to the software. These are multi-year projects that get added to with each incremental monthly software version release.
SaaS Solution
In addition to its desktop software, Fishbowl released a SaaS solution in June 2021. Fishbowl Online enables users to access a lot of features in the cloud and do things they’ve never been able to do in a desktop environment, such as customizing reports on the fly.
The great thing about a SaaS solution is that it gave Fishbowl developers a chance to start fresh and do things they had always wanted to do with the desktop software. They’ve expanded Fishbowl’s mobility by making its features accessible on Android and iOS devices.
Fishbowl Go
Fishbowl Go is an app that’s been offering basic and ever-expanding warehouse management and manufacturing functionality on mobile devices. Picking, packing, shipping, and receiving are a few of the features you’ll find in Fishbowl Go.
We’re going beyond the basic with a full user interface (UI) redesign to make it faster and easier to use. Pretty soon you’ll be able to:
- Create transfer orders
- Print shipping labels directly in the app via Shippo and Fishbowl ShipExpress
- Capture signatures on sales orders and work orders
- Correct errors made on completed orders
Fishbowl Time
Fishbowl Time can be used as a standalone product or integrated with Fishbowl Manufacturing to add labor costs to work orders. Not only materials, but the time and cost it takes to put them together get calculated with the aid of Fishbowl Time. It also helps with payroll and time tracking, as well as measuring job efficiency.
They recently refreshed the integration between Fishbowl Time and the main Fishbowl software to make sure its transferring data smoothly. Their next steps include adding:
- More user rights and permissions
- Audit controls
- More visibility in what’s happening with your workforce
- PTO and sick time accrual
Plugins
Plugins are an ever-increasing piece of what Fishbowl has to offer. They save time and money by automatically moving critical data across platforms. Walmart and Square are new plugins. Here are a few new ones that are on the horizon:
- TaxJar for tax calculations
- Squarespace for website building
- HubSpot to help with customer interactions
There’s always plenty more to do, so Fishbowl will continue to bring new functionality and products to benefit your business!