HAVE YOU OUTGROWN YOUR BUSINESS SOFTWARE?

Don’t throw the baby out with the bath water!

Have you reached the limit of your existing business software?

Are you relying on Excel for complex inventory, quoting, and manufacturing situations?

Do you like your Accounting Package, but now it is just not offering enough to meet your needs?

Don’t start from scratch and don’t reinvent the wheel. Instead add Fishbowl Inventory alongside your Accounting package and let Fishbowl take care of all the inventory and order management, and leave your Accounting system to be exactly that, an Accounting system.

Accounting systems like Xero, QuickBooks Online, and Reckon Accounts are fantastic, but they are designed with financial control in mind and not inventory management. While they offer basic inventory tracking functions, we are constantly talking with companies that have reached the limit with these functions and still need more.

So, what are the options?

Well you could start from scratch and move to a platform that offers Accounting and Inventory management as an all inclusive package … this will set you back tens of thousands of dollars, need staff training across ALL elements of your business operations which is a huge risk, and you may end up compromising both the inventory and financial control functions with a “Jack of all trades” solution … we hear this a lot.

Or, you can continue to use the Accounting system that you already know and trust, and simply add to it with a purpose built Inventory and Manufacturing management system.

We call this creating your ideal “Eco System” where you choose the best of breed to perform the functions that they were designed to perform. We do this is our everyday life by choosing the best combination of products and services that suits our lifestyle, so why not adopt this in your business.

If you went to market to find an all in one solution that was an expert in Financial control, Inventory control, mobile sales app, CRM, eCommerce, POS, shipping and freight you will absolutely struggle to find this as a one stop shop. However, by creating your ideal Eco-System it could look something like this:

Financial control = Xero or QuickBooks Online or Reckon Accounts

Inventory control = Fishbowl Inventory – (Warehouse version)

Manufacturing = Fishbowl Inventory – (Manufacturing Version)

Time Clock system = Fishbowl Time

Mobile sales app = SalesIn

B2B Customer Orders = SalesIn

CRM = Salesforce or Zoho

eCommerce = Shopify or WooCommerce or Magento etc

POS = Shopify POS or Square POS

Shipping and freight = Starshipit

And guess what? All of these platforms can be fully integrated via Fishbowl for an ultra-efficient workflow that reduces duplicate data entry, provides best of breed capabilities, and will save you thousands of dollars. In the future if you decide to change your one element of your eco system, no problem, you don’t have to start all over, just replace that one piece of your puzzle.

So what are these limitations that the Accounting systems have with regards to Inventory Management?

1. The Accounting systems only offer inventory control for one location.

What happens if you want to open a 2nd warehouse, or split your stock between a storage area and a shop front? With your Accounting system you can only see 1 stock level.

We hear often that companies have work around excel spreadsheets to know what is in each location, but this is ridden with the potential for mistakes.

Fishbowl Inventory offers an UNLIMITED number of Warehouses, and within each of those warehouses Fishbowl offers UNLIMITED number of bin locations so you can see exactly where your stock is at all times.

2. The Accounting systems have item number limits.

Fishbowl Inventory offers an UNLIMITED number of items (Parts and Products), which can all be grouped by brand, or range, or by the grouping that is important to you.

3. The Accounting systems don’t have the capability to track your items by expiry date, lot number, or serial number tracking.

Fishbowl offers date driven tracking such as best before or expiry date tracking, also Batch or Lot Number, and even unique item identifiers such as Serial Number tracking.

You also have the ability to create your own type of tracking with the Fishbowl Tracking creator module.

This allows for extremely powerful inventory tracking capabilities so that you can manage your stock turn with accuracy and efficiency.

4. The Accounting systems don’t handle multi level customer pricing tiers.

Fishbowl has very powerful customer pricing levels via the “Pricing Rules” module.

With Fishbowl’s Pricing Rules, you can determine;

WHO gets the rule,

WHICH items is it applied to,

WHAT the rule is (discount, markup, mark down, margin, fixed price etc),

WHY if you want to set quantity driven price breaks, and

WHEN by using the date range field.

5. The Accounting platforms don’t offer Manufacturing capability.

Manufacturing is a complex process that is often unique to each business, so it is understandable why the Accounting systems don’t offer this capability.

At Fishbowl eat, sleep and breath Inventory control regardless if you are a “box in box out” type business, or an extremely complex multi staged manufacturing business. Fishbowl offers full Bill of Material, Manufacturing Order, and Work Order functions with the ability to consume items in inventory as part of a production run.

But I love using Excel!

Excel is a fantastic program, but it was never designed to be a business order management platform. Sure you can make Excel perform some of these tasks but often this workbook has been created and is controlled by one individual in the business. All of that knowledge is locked up with that one person, and this is a huge risk for your business.

What if that individual is you? Well you could say not a problem, actually it is a problem as you are not future proofing your business.

By centralizing your business data into a system like Fishbowl you remove this risk and future proof your business. You also ensure the accurate information is the starting point with powerful Purchasing, Receiving, and Inventory control. This is the information that is integrated with your Accounting system and removes the risk of poor data manipulation and control in Excel.

For you Excel lovers, we can create a live data feed to Excel from Fishbowl so you can still play with the accurate data to your heart’s content. Pull ACCURATE, LIVE data from Fishbowl and use this in Excel to create your reporting that you want to see, but leave the full inventory lifecycle from Purchase to Customer order, to Invoice up to Fishbowl.

4 reasons you should use Fishbowl over spreadsheets:

Eliminate data entry errors: Use barcode scanners to instantly update your inventory records instead of manually typing in data.
Save time and money: No more double data entry thanks to Fishbowl’s seamless accounting integrations.
Increase security: Assign user rights to staff to restrict information viewing, and access rights for certain tasks.
Get detailed reports: Fishbowl lets you analyse your inventory data to spot trends and other valuable insights.

Bring your inventory management system to a whole new level of efficiency by signing up for a free trial of Fishbowl!

Outgrowing the capabilities of your current business software is a very common situation when we are talking with companies. We would love to speak with you so that we can help you put together your ideal Eco System, and show you how advances in technology now allow for a fully integrated business solution with Fishbowl at the heart of your operations.

Call or email us today and one of our experienced Solutions Specialists will contact you to find the perfect fit for you and your business.

CONTACT US

Contact one of our amazing Client Solutions Specialists to have a chat about your frustrations, and let us show you how Fishbowl can help your business to grow.

LET US HELP YOU !!

Fishbowl has been successfully developing and implementing inventory management software for 20 years!