Likelihood to Recommend Fishbowl is well suited for warehouse operations because you can control, monitor, report or view the progress of materials all the way from purchasing and receiving to the shipment and tracking of products. It integrates with major carriers and with QuickBooks so it does offer a suite that can support the entire operation. It allows for workflow monitoring, so particular groups or products can be tracked.
Read full review It is perfect for any small business looking for inventory control, Tracking purchase history, and just an all round easy to use software for retail and beyond. I would not use it if I have only a few hundred items or was a larger company that can afford to build my own POS software.
Read full review Pros Inventory control - provides easy/accurate reports. Also, cycle counts can be done at any time. The warehouse team was easily trained. Sales Orders - Fishbowl allowed us to have the sales orders accessible to everyone and linked the customers' purchase order to the orders and work orders (within the system). It no longer needs to be manually linked. Custom reports - for a small fee we had reports customized specifically for our company. Link to Quickbooks - invoices generated directly after closure of sales order. Read full review Lightspeed Retail has great reports that are very easy to read and understand. Lightspeed Retail is great to train new employees on because of its ease of use. There are not lots of different things that you have to learn just basics. Read full review Cons MRP BOM creation Unified interface Read full review With a larger SKU assortment size, the software really starts to struggle with doing physical inventory after scanning in a few hundred items. Several times throughout each year Lightspeed went down on us (not our internet connection but actually Lightspeed verified). Special order system could use a lot of modern improvements (ability to schedule ahead of time, etc.) Reports are very basic, and will likely require there Lightspeed Analytics to actually get reports useful for day to day operations. Weak system for receiving purchase orders. Does not handle items and cases for reordering very well. Have used multiple Point of Sale systems in the past 10 years that allow to set reorder points based on single items, but reorder the case automatically, Lightspeed has no support for this. Read full review Usability Very easy to use and figure out without calling customer support which is also very responsive and helpful.
Read full review Support Rating Originally the support for Fishbowl was very poor. It was hard to get anyone to help. In the last 12 - 14 months, it has greatly improved and if it continues this way I would certainly rate it higher.
Read full review I gave the rating of a 9 because ninety percent of the time when I talk to their support they're very helpful. One of the only real issues I have is there are times where the queue will be 7-9 people deep. When you have an error you don't know how to fix, sometimes this is very troubling. But overall their support is usually quick and friendly.
Read full review Alternatives Considered Fishbowl is more useful than QuickBooks Manufacturing if you operate complex manufacturing with multiple multi layered BOMS
Read full review Lightspeed is faster, sleeker and more modern than our previous POS system. I can’t express enough how easy the online store portion of Lightspeed is - it just intuitive and sometimes, is TOO easy, I feel like I have to be forgetting something. Lightspeed is staying modern and current where our previous POS was not
Read full review Return on Investment Positive: Decreased time spent on copy/pasting in spreadsheets. Positive: Easier to analyze costs and guarantee efficiency. Negative: Time to get it up and running is really difficult to work with. Read full review Certainly has saved money on cash-outs/ accounting due to QuickBooks integration. Faster processing through tills means happier customers and more sales per hour. Expensive product at $5K a year has taken away some profitability for this small business. It's way, way over priced. Read full review ScreenShots