Fishbowl is designed to make work easier for accountants, warehouse workers, and managers. It does this by giving them access to the advanced tools they need to do their jobs better and faster than ever. For example, Fishbowl integrates with QuickBooks to keep a company’s accounting and inventory records in sync. It also provides barcode scanning to speed up order fulfillment and increase accuracy.
There are many other intuitive features Fishbowl offers to make your job easier. Let’s go over the top 10.
1. Notification of Vendors’ Required Quantities and Discounts
Putting together a purchase order isn’t always as simple as you might think. There are all kinds of factors to consider, such as the case when vendors won’t ship items until they reach a certain quantity, and other times when they offer discounts for bulk orders that meet a high threshold.
It’s hard to remember all of these specifics, which is why Fishbowl has Vendor module options to automatically notify you when you’re just short of the vendor’s minimum for shipping, and when you could qualify for a discount by ordering just a few more. This helpful feature ensures your purchase orders are successfully received and fulfilled, and that you get the best deal possible on them.
2. Category Capacity Planning Report
Fishbowl’s Category Capacity Planning Report allows you to manage your manufacturing schedule and daily capacity. It shows the daily limit, in terms of hours, you are able to dedicate to a variety of manufacturing tasks. You can add work orders to specific days and even split one across multiple days. The report will warn you if you have scheduled too many things on a particular day. It will also give you the option to reschedule.
3. Sales Production Demand Report
The Sales Production Demand Report shows the suggested start dates and inventory demand generated by open sales orders. You can quickly see how many finished goods you have on hand to fulfill each sales order and if there are any short quantities. That way, you’ll see exactly how many finished goods you need to manufacture or order before you have enough to fulfill the orders.
4. One-Step Order Fulfillment
Receiving is typically a two-step process. First, receive physical goods. Second, reconcile to confirm costs and shipping match the vendor bill. A Receiving module option allows you to fulfill the order in just one step through the Receiving Data CSV import. By clicking the box in the Fulfill column, you can receive an item without having to go through the reconciliation process.
5. Calendar Categories
It’s easy to create categories in the Calendar module to ensure your work orders, purchase orders, sales orders, and more get processed and completed in a timely manner. When you create categories, everything in your calendar becomes color-coordinated by category so that any worker looking at it can instantly see what types of tasks are scheduled at specific times.
6. Matching Manufacture Order and Sales Order Numbers
There is a Manufacture Order module option that lets you automatically match a newly created manufacture order’s number to the number of the sales order that created it. This might seem like a small thing, but it has far-reaching consequences. Manufacture orders are frequently generated by sales orders to make more of an item that is short. By giving them the same number, you make it super simple to track down their corresponding orders and see what their status is.
7. Notification to Update Orders to Reflect a Revised Bill of Materials
When you make a change to a bill of materials, do you ever worry that any open work orders or sales orders that rely on that bill of materials could be at risk of not being performed correctly? You don’t have to worry about that at all when you use Fishbowl Manufacturing. It automatically generates a notification soon after anyone modifies a bill of materials, prompting users to make those same changes to all open orders that are affected.
8. Hot Keys
If you want to navigate the Fishbowl software even faster than you thought possible, all you have to do is make use of Fishbowl Hot Keys. These are combinations of keystrokes that perform the same function as mouse-clicks on buttons in the interface. We all use hot keys to quickly copy, paste, and highlight text, and do other tasks in Word, for example. Once you master them in Fishbowl’s various modules, you’ll be able to fly through inventory management tasks!
9. Custom Fields
Fishbowl gives you the ability to customize basically all of its modules by adding custom fields to them. Rather than having to squeeze your company into a one-size-fits-all box, you can modify Fishbowl to fit your company’s unique way of managing inventory. You have the option to rename fields, create entire new ones, and do many other things. The types of custom fields you can create include: text (up to 30 characters), long text (up to 512 characters), date, money, checkbox, dropdown list, URL, quantity (allows decimal points), and count (no decimal points).
10. API
Fishbowl is famous for its seamless integration with QuickBooks. Because of that, we see the value in opening our software to other developers in order to create new integrations. The Fishbowl API allows both customers and third-party developers to build integrations to their business solutions. At the API link above, you will find links to sample code and the Fishbowl Developer Hook, which will let you connect with Fishbowl and begin the process of integrating.
Amazing Fishbowl Features
If you’re a current Fishbowl customer, you can start using these features today to see dramatic results. If you’d like to become a Fishbowl customer, sign up for an online demo of the software to see these, and many other, features in action. You’ll be pleasantly surprised by the benefits Fishbowl has to offer your business!