Solution For Warehouse Control And Inventory Management Fishbowl Inventory

Last month I successfully implemented another Fishbowl Inventory project for an Alpharetta based firm. This company bought and sold used technology equipment and had formerly relied on a very old DOS based system and countless spreadsheets to manage and track their inventory and the financials were created by entering summary journal entries for sales, expenses, and inventory adjustments.

Last year they brought a financial manager onboard to help improve the back office and financial operations. Over the course of 3 months I met with the company a few times to discuss and demonstrate how Fishbowl Inventory and QuickBooks Enterprise could help them implement very accurate recordkeeping for their inventory and financials. We agreed to implement the systems at the start of business 2011.

This company also has a large warehouse in which a great deal of inventory is stored on pallets, and those pallets are stored on shelf locations. So, in addition to serial number tracking we had to create special, custom tracking for pallet, testing data, special HECI code, and other tracking specific to this type of business. Fishbowl Inventory allowed us to do this very easily.

In almost every project like this the biggest challenge is getting the inventory data extracted and prepared for the initial importing. The challenge is normally more in the extracting from the legacy systems. Once the data is extracted Fishbowl Inventory has a good facility for importing the data. Once the detailed inventory data was received I was able to get it into the right format to import into Fishbowl in about 12 hours.

The initial loading of data resulted in 6,600+ Parts, over 45,000 specific serial numbers, and $834,000 of inventory assets. This matched to the penny with the extracted data. Once the data was loaded and the warehouse staff trained it became a simple matter to find any piece of equipment in the warehouse. With a serial number they could look up the aisle, shelf location, and pallet location.

By the end of January the entire staff was trained and the systems were successfully being used to help them run the business and know much more timely how the business was performing.

For more information on Fishbowl Inventory or QuickBooks Enterprise Solutions contact Rick Daigle at 888-972-9449, or rdaigle@b2bcfo.com.