Fishbowl 2026.2: new BI dashboards, remote server administration, and a REST API performance overhaul

Fishbowl shipped version 2026.2 (26.2). This is a meatier release than 26.1: new dashboards, real remote administration, and REST API work that matters more than the changelog makes it look.

What’s new

• Five professionally-designed BI dashboards. New Production Scheduling (drag-and-drop manufacturing order calendar) and Company dashboards, plus updated Sales, Purchasing, and Inventory dashboards, all with drill-down. Two setup notes that will save you a support ticket: each dashboard needs its own user right granted in the User Group module before anyone can see it, and if your team prefers the old look, Classic Dashboards are still available under Settings.
• Server Administration module. Administration tasks that used to require logging on to the Fishbowl Server box are now in the client: view and log off active connections, message connected users, enforce single-login, set inactivity timeouts, and restart the server remotely with a warning delay. The restart is gated behind a new “Restart Fishbowl Server” user right, granted only to admin by default.
• Tracked parts on outsourced Purchase Orders. Lot numbers, serials, expiration dates, and custom tracking now survive the outsourced-manufacturing flow, so you no longer have to strip tracking off parts to make outsourcing work.
• Automatic backup retention. Scheduled backup tasks can now delete backups older than a set number of days. This one made us smile: sysadmins have spent years hand-rolling PowerShell and batch scripts to fake exactly this, and now it’s a setting. Our wish for a future release is compression. Some customer databases are large enough that any compression on backups would be very welcome, but we’ll take retention today. Under the hood this adds a deleteBackupOlderThan column to the fbschedule table, worth knowing if you have custom reports or scripts that read the schedule table.
• REST API memo endpoints. Full memo management (list, get, create, update, delete) for Sales Orders, Parts, and Products.

Fixes worth noting

The big one for integration builders: the REST API got a real performance overhaul. Fishbowl replaced the old HttpURLConnection plumbing with the modern HttpClient, enabled HTTP/2, removed the JSON size limit on requests, and cut redundant base64 encoding and double serialization. The practical effect: the Java heap space errors that plagued large datasets (lots of orders, customers, or parts) are resolved, and big syncs move noticeably less data. If you throttled or chunked an integration to work around those errors, it may be worth revisiting.

Also worth calling out:

• QuickBooks Online automated sales tax is now included in Run Payment Links. Previously the QBO-estimated tax showed on the Sales Order but silently vanished from the payment link total, so customers were underbilled by the tax amount.
• REST API documentation cleanup. Search-endpoint filters are now correctly marked optional, best-price parameters are documented accurately, and the old wiki links point at the current help site.

If any of these touch how you run Fishbowl and you want a hand, get in touch.