Fishbowl

Very easy tool to replace drawing names from a bowl.

Comments: Email marketing. Cover tracking Basically a CRM

Pros:

Great marketing email tool for restaurants. They can manage much of your digital footprint and offer a very easy to use email platform.

Cons:

It can be very basic at times and what you see is what you get. you can have many different accounts under a single login. you will need someone to manage this rather than do it your self.

Good for restaurant industry

Comments: Fishbowl lost their focus on email innovation through transitions in recent years. They seem to be understaffed/high turnover in their Customer Success/Account Rep department with new reps being assigned every couple months which causes wasted time getting new reps up to speed. We've been promised a lot in terms of better customer service but it just hasn't materialized.

Pros:

Fishbowl has a very user-friendly platform with a lot of WYSIWYG platforms. It's fast and easy to set up emails especially if you have templates set up. The ability to preview PC and mobile views helps to ensure your email list is getting a great-looking email.

Cons:

Fishbowl seems slow-to-market on important updates, like being slow to offer an adjustable template to fit varying screen sizes and a lack of innovation in the email template space. You can do cool things if you have a coder on staff, but if you don't, it takes a long time for them to build you a template.

Fishbowl - Does not integrate well with QBO

Comments: Very lackluster experience overall, especially for the price! Be very, very wary and test before fully connecting and pushing to QBO.

Pros:

Ability to manage inventory, invoices, POs, etc. all from one platform

Cons:

Fishbowl has been a struggle from the start - it is a fairly expensive product and we expected so much more. The functionality is not nearly as user-friendly as we had hoped, and the integration with QBO is awful! We integrated for invoicing, but spent more time trying to figure out and fix what Fishbowl pushed to QBO than if we entered it manually, so we turned it off. Depending on if something is marked Fulfilled, or Fulfilled and Paid, etc, it pushes an invoice, or a sales receipt. It's hard to keep up with the inconsistency. You almost need invoices completely fulfilled and paid before it's great to push to QBO. There also doesn't seem to be great reports to pull to see the bigger picture, which makes it tedious.

Fishbowl

Comments: We have been able to capture all of our purchase orders and receiving in one system and we have better visibility of our incoming inventory.

Pros:

The software takes a while to get used to. The buttons are in weird places and are kind of confusing. I like that we have controls in place for purchasing and receiving. The trainers were amazing.

Cons:

Not so easy to fix simple receiving mistakes. Wish there was an audit trail to see which users were making mistakes.

Great Software! Spot on analytics

Pros:

This is a fantastic marketing tool. It will give you a wealth of knowledge so you can better position your company to get the most value for your buck.

Cons:

Time consuming. You have to work for the information by keying in guest information or mailing in sign up cards.