good inventory management/tracking system/app?

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#1
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Can anyone recommend a good app/system for inventory management for a startup retail company?
I googled and got some names such as Zoho, Ecomdash, Fishbowl but have no idea how well they functions.
Thanks!
 

#2
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I know of a handful of companies (including my wife's) who use Fishbowl. All users are reasonably pleased. Pay for the integration assistance to ensure you're set up properly. The one company I know that didn't regretted not doing so.

They all have their drawbacks, but you modify your processes to control for those.
~Captcook
 

#3
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Thank you, very helpful!
 

#4
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I used Fishbowl as the inventory/warehouse management system for a consumer goods company in the 2012-2014 timeframe. Average sales order had at least 100 line items. Fishbowl Mobile, at that time, could not accommodate fulfillment of such large orders and we had constant issues with dropping server connections, not properly pulling sales orders based on pick tickets, etc. It was not the mobile devices themselves but the software--they provided us a means to test the Mobile software on a laptop and it had the same issues. Our staff, and myself on all related matters, spent a tremendous amount of time manually correcting sales orders and invoices. It became so tedious that inventory numbers were always off, so I had to implement cycle counting just to try to stay ahead of issues that would throw off inventory.

It worked just fine with retail (ecommerce) orders that had only 1-10 line items.

I have an IT background and I did the setup and integration with Quickbooks Enterprise. It was configured properly, as confirmed by Fishbowl, but it created continuous issues in Quickbooks with inventory figures, threw off financials, and several times corrupted the QB data file. We started implementation of NetSuite a few months before I resigned and I heard nightmares about that migration, too, for well over a year after they finalized it (and a year behind schedule of when I would have completed it).

I know I paint a crappy picture of FIshbowl. It is not a terrible program, it was just a very bad fit for our environment, but there really was not much available at the time. For smaller operations with smaller order sizes, it works very well. When set up properly in the right setting, it works very well. I know they have made some coding changes but that is one of the biggest things I took issue with--their coding was immensely bloated and needlessly complicated. I had software coders look at it while Fishbowl was modifying our software and they just shook their heads. Would I use it again? Yes, in the right setting. One thing I found very annoying was the difficulty of developing new reports in Fishbowl; TECHNICALLY it could be done in-house but the way they built their tables was a nightmare. We opted to pay $300-1,000 each for various custom reports, some of which should definitely have been standard to the software.

Also look at ACCTivate. There was one other I liked and felt was more reliable, but I cannot remember the name of it. Like all software, do your research, ask to speak with actual users before committing to any sort of contract, etc. And like tax software, there is no perfect system.
 

#5
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CornerstoneCPA wrote:I used Fishbowl as the inventory/warehouse management system for a consumer goods company in the 2012-2014 timeframe. Average sales order had at least 100 line items. Fishbowl Mobile, at that time, could not accommodate fulfillment of such large orders and we had constant issues with dropping server connections, not properly pulling sales orders based on pick tickets, etc. It was not the mobile devices themselves but the software--they provided us a means to test the Mobile software on a laptop and it had the same issues. Our staff, and myself on all related matters, spent a tremendous amount of time manually correcting sales orders and invoices. It became so tedious that inventory numbers were always off, so I had to implement cycle counting just to try to stay ahead of issues that would throw off inventory.

It worked just fine with retail (ecommerce) orders that had only 1-10 line items.

I have an IT background and I did the setup and integration with Quickbooks Enterprise. It was configured properly, as confirmed by Fishbowl, but it created continuous issues in Quickbooks with inventory figures, threw off financials, and several times corrupted the QB data file. We started implementation of NetSuite a few months before I resigned and I heard nightmares about that migration, too, for well over a year after they finalized it (and a year behind schedule of when I would have completed it).

I know I paint a crappy picture of FIshbowl. It is not a terrible program, it was just a very bad fit for our environment, but there really was not much available at the time. For smaller operations with smaller order sizes, it works very well. When set up properly in the right setting, it works very well. I know they have made some coding changes but that is one of the biggest things I took issue with--their coding was immensely bloated and needlessly complicated. I had software coders look at it while Fishbowl was modifying our software and they just shook their heads. Would I use it again? Yes, in the right setting. One thing I found very annoying was the difficulty of developing new reports in Fishbowl; TECHNICALLY it could be done in-house but the way they built their tables was a nightmare. We opted to pay $300-1,000 each for various custom reports, some of which should definitely have been standard to the software.

Also look at ACCTivate. There was one other I liked and felt was more reliable, but I cannot remember the name of it. Like all software, do your research, ask to speak with actual users before committing to any sort of contract, etc. And like tax software, there is no perfect system.


Thanks so much for the detailed feedback! It is very helpful!
 


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