How to export your data from Fishbowl Inventory

Fishbowl is the inventory layer bolted onto QuickBooks for a great many small manufacturers and distributors. Its export module is genuinely good — the work is in knowing which five exports to run, and how Parts and Products fit together.

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1.Before you export: pin the cutover

The single most common way a migration goes wrong has nothing to do with columns. On-hand quantities are only true at an instant. If you export stock on Monday and go live on Friday, you have imported a week-old picture and every discrepancy afterwards will be blamed on the new system.

Agree a freeze point with everyone who touches Fishbowl. Then either:

• have the team work on paper between the freeze and go-live, and key the gap in; or
• accept the drift and reconcile with a full cycle count on day one.

Both are fine. Silently drifting by a week is not.

2.What to pull

Ask for these five things, whatever else you decide to bring:

1. Item master, including the inactive/obsolete flags so you can filter rather than lose them.
2. On-hand quantity per item, as of a stated date and time.
3. Current average or last cost per item.
4. Customer and vendor master, with addresses and terms.
5. Open purchase orders and sales orders, if the cutover isn't on a quiet day.

3.The export, step by step

Data Import/Export module

1. Open the Data Import/Export module — File → Export.
2. Run these exports: Part, Product, Customer, Vendor, and Inventory (for on-hand quantities).
3. Hit Export Template first on each one. That gives you the exact column headers for your install, including any custom fields your team has added — which the generic documentation won't show you.
4. Output can be CSV, TXT, XLS, or XLSX. Any of them is fine.

4.Field mapping into AegisSwift

AegisSwift's item importer accepts a plain spreadsheet. These are the columns worth filling and where they come from in Fishbowl:

Import vendors before items. The vendor column matches on name against vendors that already exist. Run the party import first and the links form automatically; run it second and every item row warns instead.

5.Gotchas

Filter on Active — but export everything first

Fishbowl databases accumulate years of dead parts. Export the lot including the active flag, then filter in the spreadsheet. Filtering at the source is how you discover six months later that "inactive" was also hiding something you still sell.

Custom fields hide at the right-hand edge

They come through prefixed CF- on parts and CFP- on products. Teams often keep something load-bearing there — a bin location, a customer part number, a compliance code. Always scroll right and ask.

Multi-location quantities need consolidating

The Inventory export reports quantity per location group. Decide whether those become separate AegisSwift locations or one opening balance, and consolidate before importing.

Anything the module won't give you

Fishbowl runs on MySQL. On self-hosted installs a read-only database connection will get you whatever the export module won't — useful for transaction history, which no export path covers well.

6.What happens on our side

You upload the two spreadsheets — items, and parties (customers and vendors) — and the import wizards match on sku and name respectively, so a re-import updates rather than duplicates. That matters more than it sounds: you will almost certainly import twice, once to see what breaks and once for real.

One difference to expect if you're coming from Fishbowl via QuickBooks: AegisSwift costs inventory on a moving average. Your opening cost column seeds that basis. If your accounting uses FIFO, the two will not agree penny-for-penny after the first receipt — that's a costing-method difference, not an error, and it's worth telling your accountant before go-live rather than after.

If you manufacture: bringing the bills of materials

Fishbowl's base is manufacturers, so the item and party files are usually not the whole move. Add a third export: the Bill of Materials CSV, which Fishbowl writes one row per BOM line with the BOM number, the part number, quantity and unit of measure, the item type, and — where a BOM is built in stages — an IS STAGE flag with the STAGE BOM NUMBER it refers to. Keep the item types: they distinguish the finished good, the raw materials and any sub-assembly that has a BOM of its own. Export the BOM instructions too, if the steps carry text you want to keep.

On our side the BOM importer takes a flat file of parent_sku, component_sku, qty_per and scrap_percent — one row per component, parents and sub-assemblies alike — and builds each bill of materials whole or not at all, with a warning list for anything odd rather than a half-imported BOM. Import the items first, so every SKU the BOM file names already exists, and import sub-assembly BOMs before the products that use them, so the parent's cost can roll up through them. Two things do not come across in a file and are set once afterwards: the routing steps with their times and rates, and the scrap allowance, which Fishbowl's line does not carry and which the cost rollup guide explains.

Open work orders are the one thing not to migrate. Finish or cancel them in Fishbowl before the cutover, so the on-hand quantities you export are not partly inside a job; release the first work orders in AegisSwift against the imported BOMs. The work order guide covers what a released order does to stock, which is why a job open across the cutover is a count discrepancy waiting to happen.

7.Questions people ask

Can I export my data out of Fishbowl myself?

Yes. The Data Import/Export module is self-serve and needs no ticket or professional-services engagement. Self-hosted installs additionally expose MySQL directly.

Will I lose my custom fields?

Not if you look for them — they export as CF- and CFP- columns. Map the ones that matter to AegisSwift fields, or keep them in the description.

How long does this take?

The exports themselves are minutes. Joining Parts to Products and agreeing what counts as active is the real work — budget an afternoon for a typical catalogue, and expect to run the import twice.