Fishbowl Inventory vs. Katana Cloud Inventory

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.

Incentivized

Katana Cloud Inventory is great for shipping and receiving busiiness. Where things are very cut and dry as far as what comes in and what goes out, this program is excellent at keeping track of these things. We do a lot of custom build items and it is not the greatest for these. A lot of time it is difficult to both enter these items and keep track of these items.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Tracks incoming and outgoing parts/items
• Very easy to use and easy to learn.
• Able to implement the program quickly and begin using because of ease of use

Incentivized

• MRP
• BOM creation
• Unified interface

Incentivized

• Auto email generated with PO's cannot be permanently altered in my opinion.
• Different pack sizes of same items do not automatically fill in inventory I've found. For example, we order an item in singles, 4-packs, and 32 packs. In my experience, If we order the 32 pack, it does not show inventory for the smaller unit sizes. Each pack size has a different item number I believe.
• Fields on the PO are not adjustable in my experience. You must create a template and use the template. You cannot change the PO each time unless you have a template created in my experience.
• When closing out a sales order, if you invoice from Katana Cloud Inventory and send to Quickbooks, it automatically enables the invoice to receive credit cards in Quickbooks. We use another credit card service (not Quickbooks) and do not want this feature turned on. There is no way to disable it at this time.
• When being billed for a PO that has been received and that bill is sent over to Quickbooks, it does not show item counts in my expereince. It only translates as a total dollar amount for each line item.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Fishbowl is more useful than QuickBooks Manufacturing if you operate complex manufacturing with multiple multi layered BOMS

Incentivized

Our Quickbooks inventory was input incorrectly by a former employee and fixing it would have been more time consuming and less cost effective than to come up with an alternative solution. Katana Cloud Inventory was our alternative solution. Katana Cloud Inventory says that they are working on some of the integration problems with Quickbooks, and once they are fixed, will be a huge help!

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• So far we are still in the process of counting all of our inventory. We use tens of thousands of parts
• What we do have in inventory already is tracked very well.
• Parts have been in stock as needed since we implemented Katana Cloud Inventory.

Incentivized