Fishbowl makes
every part count

A bracelet is a small thing. Keeping enough of the right pieces to make thousands of bracelets is a different proposition. At Mack & Rex, a Utah family business, growth brought an awkward combination: too much of some material, too little of another, and orders that still needed entering by hand. Success had produced its own clerical department.

That is a useful place to meet Fishbowl. The company sells software for businesses whose physical operations have become harder to follow than their financial records. An accountant can know the value of the stock while the person packing an order still cannot find the missing component. Both people can be doing their jobs properly. The system between them can still be inadequate.

The books are right. The shelf is wrong.

Fishbowl’s long-running proposition is to strengthen that connection. It integrates with QuickBooks and Xero, adding inventory and operational tools around accounting systems businesses already use. Its expertise sits in the details of physical goods: locations, components, purchasing, production stages, serial numbers and shipments.

For a distributor, that can mean knowing which warehouse has stock and turning an order into picking and shipping work. For a manufacturer, it means connecting the finished item to the parts and labor required to make it. For an online merchant, it means getting orders and inventory records to agree across sales channels.

The company says its manufacturing offering is trusted by more than 6,000 businesses. The variety is revealing: its published customer stories include food producers, automotive businesses, jewelry sellers and water-treatment manufacturers. Their products differ considerably. Their need to account for things moving through a business is remarkably similar.

A recipe for the warehouse

Consider Safeway Water, which makes filtration equipment ranging from household systems to commercial installations. Its Fishbowl case study describes disconnected serial tracking, difficult pricing adjustments and manual workarounds. Custom products made component tracking and cost estimates increasingly awkward. What failed first was the connective tissue between those activities.

The company implemented Fishbowl Advanced and moved from QuickBooks Desktop to QuickBooks Online, working with VARC Solutions. It standardized bills of materials, improved serial-number traceability and brought more structure to costing and quoting. A bill of materials is essentially a recipe. Its value grows when the recipe, the available ingredients and the customer’s order all refer to the same job.

Fishbowl’s range reflects those different tasks. Fishbowl Inventory is presented as a cloud-native inventory and warehouse product. Advanced covers deeper warehouse and manufacturing requirements with hosting and self-managed choices. Commerce, using Sellware, connects shopping carts and marketplaces. Payments brings payment collection into the workflow. These are buying choices with different requirements, rather than interchangeable labels.

AI Insights adds another way into the records: an assistant named Athena for business questions, reports and analysis, powered by ConverSight. Current manufacturing marketing also promotes AI assistance with readiness checks, shortages and draft production or purchase documents. The practical attraction is less time assembling the information needed for the next decision.

The price of fewer handoffs

Fishbowl sells business software through subscriptions, with pricing affected by the product, users and deployment. In October 2026, its published Advanced starting prices were $595 a month for Warehouse and $675 for Manufacturing. Those are starting points; the final configuration is quoted. A buyer should price implementation, integrations and the operating setup alongside the subscription.

At Mack & Rex, the reported benefit was time recovered from repetitive work. In Fishbowl’s customer story, CEO Christy Hair describes saving 50 hours a week on order entry. The business also reports roughly $8,800 in monthly savings across personnel and inventory. Those figures describe one customer’s experience, not an expected return for every purchaser.

“We were able to shave 50 hours a week off order entry”Christy Hair / CEO, Mack & Rex
In Fishbowl’s customer story

The telling detail comes afterward: Hair said the ability to integrate Sellware gave the business confidence to consider additional sales channels. Reliable order flow changed what expansion looked like. Another storefront becomes more appealing when it does not require another pile of manual entries.

A bigger net, one connection at a time

Founded in 2001 by Chuck and Beverly Hale, Fishbowl has repeatedly expanded around adjacent problems. Its history includes manufacturing, hosted deployment and ecommerce. Diversis Capital acquired the company in December 2021, describing plans to invest in products, international growth and acquisitions. Sellware joined in 2023.

In August 2026, Fishbowl announced its acquisition of Repfabric, which supplies CRM and commission-management software for manufacturers, representatives and distributors. The announcement said integration was underway. The proposed connection extends upstream: from customer conversations and sales commissions into purchasing, inventory and fulfillment. It is a broader ambition than counting stock.

There is competition on both sides. Cin7 and Zoho Inventory offer overlapping inventory and commerce tools. NetSuite offers a wider accounting-and-operations suite. Fishbowl’s appeal is particularly clear for businesses that want more operational control while retaining familiar accounting. That positioning does not make every integration or manufacturing requirement an automatic fit.

Bring the awkward order

The lesson a reader can copy is practical: follow one troublesome order from sale to delivery. Record every re-entry, missing component and manual correction. Then ask a software vendor to demonstrate that exact sequence, including the return. The exercise makes a feature list answerable to an actual business problem.

A small operation with straightforward stock may need less software. A group seeking unified multinational finance may need a broader suite. And any inventory tool depends on disciplined receiving, counting and item records. Fishbowl can connect the steps. The opportunity begins when a business can identify which steps keep coming apart.