Yes, but the depth depends on the product. Fishbowl Advanced Manufacturing and Fishbowl Advanced Warehouse track lot, serial, and expiration data from the receiving dock through a work order to the shipment, so you can pull a recall list without touching a spreadsheet. Fishbowl Inventory, the cloud product, is built for finished-goods speed, not that traceability depth, yet.
A pallet of lot 4471 goes out mixed with lot 4402 because the picker grabbed from the wrong bin, and now someone spends the afternoon on the phone with a customer, a supplier, and maybe a regulator, trying to rebuild a paper trail that should have taken thirty seconds to pull. A serialized part fails under warranty and nobody can say which vendor batch it came from without opening three spreadsheets and a filing cabinet. Every lot or serial number that lives outside the system running receiving, picking, and shipping is a number that can go missing at the worst possible moment.
That shows up as delayed orders while someone hunts for a clean lot to ship. Wasted labor rebuilding a chain of custody by hand instead of pulling it from a screen. Unnecessary inventory held back just in case, because nobody trusts the count on a specific lot number. For a company shipping regulated food, supplements, medical devices, or anything sold with a serial number and a warranty attached, these are not rare events. They are Tuesday.
Most software shows you the problem and leaves you the work.
Fishbowl is the platform. Fishbowl Inventory, Fishbowl Advanced Manufacturing, and Fishbowl Advanced Warehouse are purpose-built parts of Fishbowl, matched to how the business runs. Lot, serial, and expiration depth is not a feature bolted onto one product line. It lives where the operational complexity lives: receiving with variable expiration dates, work orders that consume specific lots, and warehouses that have to prove where a unit has been.
The product-fit question is worth answering plainly. If you buy finished goods and resell them, Fishbowl Inventory handles receiving, stocking, picking, transfers, and fulfillment. Add Fishbowl Channels when those products sell through Shopify, Amazon, Walmart, or other channels. If you manufacture the product and need BOMs, work orders, MRP, production scheduling, or job and labor costing, use Fishbowl Advanced Manufacturing, with Channels added if you also sell online. If you do not manufacture but need deeper warehouse workflows such as 3PL management or EDI-driven fulfillment, use Fishbowl Advanced Warehouse. Multiple storefronts or owned locations alone do not automatically mean you need Advanced.
Inside Fishbowl Advanced Manufacturing and Fishbowl Advanced Warehouse, a lot or serial number travels with the item from the receiving dock through a work order, a pick, a pack, and a ship confirmation. An expiration date sits on the record, not on a sticky note taped to a shelf. When a lot needs to be pulled, the system can trace forward to every order that shipped on it and back to the vendor batch it came from. That is the traceability depth food, supplement, and device manufacturers need when a customer, or an auditor, asks a hard question. Fishbowl Inventory is not there yet on the cloud side, and we will say so plainly rather than let a sales conversation imply otherwise.
Both Fishbowl Inventory and Fishbowl Advanced carry data-focused AI that tells you what is happening, what is coming, and what needs your attention: a lot running short before the next production run, a shelf count drifting from the system, a reorder point about to trip. It is not the AI Operations Specialist, and it is not the same experience on both products. It is plain-English reporting built on live data, and what it surfaces depends on which product runs your operation.
On the cloud side, Fishbowl Inventory adds the AI Operations Specialist. The AI Operations Specialist uses live Fishbowl data to prepare purchase orders, sales orders, transfers, receipts, and adjustments for your approval. Nothing is saved or changed without the operator's approval. Ask, Approve, Done. The AI Operations Specialist does not carry the lot-and-serial traceability depth built into Advanced; it is built for the pace of finished-goods inventory, not multilevel production genealogy, and we would rather tell you that now than after you have gone looking for it.
Fishbowl runs inventory, production, and the warehouse. QuickBooks or Xero keeps the books, and that division of labor does not change because a lot number needs a home. You can read more about how the pieces fit together on the Fishbowl Inventory homepage before deciding which product matches your floor.
Hodo Foods, a food manufacturer running lot-driven production, cut stockouts by 35 percent after putting Fishbowl Advanced and its data-focused AI to work on demand and inventory. Koken USA saw a 10 percent drop in backorders on the same combination. Cascadia Motion brought inventory costs down 18 percent. None of those companies got there by adding a spreadsheet column. They got there by moving lot-level and demand data into one system that could act on it, all as Advanced results built on Advanced's data-focused AI.
Training on Fishbowl Advanced is expert-led, typically six to eight weeks, and support stays in-house: US specialists for US customers, APAC for APAC, by phone, email, or chat, and you can reach a person. That is built on 25-plus years of operational know-how and more than 6,000 operations that have already run this exact traceability problem through the system before you.
You still decide what ships, what gets quarantined, and what gets recalled. Fishbowl does the finding, the linking, and the reporting so that decision takes minutes instead of an afternoon.
See the lot, serial, and expiration workflow in a live demo instead of a slide deck. Bring a real lot number if you have one. Get a demo and walk through a recall pull on your own data before you decide anything.
Fishbowl does the work. You make the call.
Frequently asked questions
Does Fishbowl Inventory track lots, serials, and expiration dates on the cloud product?
Fishbowl Inventory, the cloud product, is built for finished-goods speed: receiving, stocking, picking, transfers, and fulfillment. Full lot, serial, and expiration traceability, the kind that tracks a unit from vendor batch through work order to shipment, lives in Fishbowl Advanced Manufacturing and Fishbowl Advanced Warehouse today.
What is the difference between lot tracking and serial tracking in Fishbowl?
Lot tracking follows a batch of identical items, useful for food, supplements, and chemicals where an expiration date or a recall applies to the whole run. Serial tracking follows one specific unit, useful for equipment, electronics, and anything sold with an individual warranty. Fishbowl Advanced supports both, and neither requires the other.
How does Fishbowl handle a product recall?
Inside Fishbowl Advanced, a lot or serial number carries its history forward and backward: which vendor batch it came from and every order it shipped on. Pull the lot number and the system returns the affected orders and customers instead of a search through paper receiving logs and old spreadsheets.
Do I need Fishbowl Advanced Manufacturing or Advanced Warehouse for lot tracking?
It depends on what you do with the goods. Manufacturers who need BOMs, work orders, MRP, or job and labor costing along with lot depth use Fishbowl Advanced Manufacturing. Companies that hold and ship regulated or serialized goods without manufacturing them, including 3PL and EDI-driven fulfillment, use Fishbowl Advanced Warehouse.
