Fishbowl 2026.8: credit return exports fixed, PO reconciliation simplified, and a FIFO cost bug to check for

Fishbowl released 2026.8 (26.8) on August 25. The headline features are an AI chat button and a few quality-of-life additions. But the fix list is what will actually change your books: nine accounting fixes, several of them for credit returns and purchase order reconciliation, plus a FIFO costing bug that can leave a bad number behind even after you upgrade.

The accounting fixes that matter

Credit returns were exporting wrong in three different ways. If you duplicate a sales order as a credit return, 26.8 fixes three separate problems. Shipping-type lines were not flipped negative, so the credit was understated and the customer looked like they still owed the freight. Dollar discounts went to QuickBooks Desktop with the wrong sign, so the QBD credit memo total did not match Fishbowl. And a non-inventory part with a standard cost exported a cost of goods sold (COGS) entry that copied the original sale instead of reversing it. Each of these is small on one order and easy to miss in a monthly total. If you process returns regularly, check credit memos issued before this release against Fishbowl.
QuickBooks Online automated sales tax on credit returns. A manually created credit return added the tax as a positive amount instead of negative. The result is the same pattern: the credit is understated by the tax, and the difference hides in a sales tax liability account that most people never reconcile line by line.
PO reconciliation now posts one journal entry per sales order. Before 26.8, reconciling a purchase order posted a separate journal entry to QuickBooks Online or Xero for every shipped item. Orders with many lines or high carton counts could generate dozens of tiny entries. Now it is one entry per sales order, and Xero amounts round to the cent. The totals were never wrong, but this is why your QBO journal list has been full of small Fishbowl entries with the same date.
Reconcile no longer books cost against voided shipments. Reconciling a purchase order could record COGS against a shipment that had been voided, putting cost on a sales order line that never shipped. That is cost with no matching revenue. Worth a look if your gross margin has had unexplained dips in months with returns or reshipments.
The drop ship and credit return invoice split is undone. A change in a recent release, meant to prevent duplicate document errors, had a side effect: drop ship and credit return lines received individually created a separate invoice or credit for each line. 26.8 combines lines that share a reference number back into a single document. Avalara users are excluded from this fix, so if you use Avalara you will still see one invoice per line.
QBO export failing on vendor country. Exports could fail with an “invalid or unsupported property” error tied to the vendor’s country field. Fishbowl now sends the format QBO expects. If you had vendor bills stuck in the export queue with that message, upgrade and re-export.

The FIFO costing bug

Two fixes in the purchasing section deserve their own note because they affect FIFO (first in, first out) databases specifically.

Reconciling a purchase order on a FIFO database could inflate a part’s average cost to an extremely large value, eventually causing a save error. And voiding a shipment, then reconciling the original PO with a landed cost, treated the returned quantity as its own cost layer and misallocated the landed cost. This is fixed in 26.8.

The fix stops the bug going forward. It does not repair cost layers that were already written wrong. If you run FIFO and reconcile POs with freight or landed costs, pull an inventory valuation report before and after your upgrade and look for parts with an average cost that makes no sense. Those are the ones that got hit.

Everything else new

AI Chat button. A new toolbar button opens Fishbowl’s AI support chat directly from the client, 24 hours a day. It can hand you off to a support technician during Fishbowl’s support hours (6:30 AM to 4:30 PM Mountain).
Update Pricing button on sales orders. Re-applies your pricing rules to every line on an existing order in one click. Useful when an order sits in Entered for weeks and costs have moved, especially with cost-based pricing rules.
Payment status in Sales Order and Shipping. An optional Payment Status column (right-click the search columns to add it) and an advanced search filter for no payment, partial, or paid in full. The filter can be saved as the module’s default search, making a “ready to ship, fully paid” view a two-minute setup.
Bulk location renaming by CSV. A Location Renaming import and export, working the same way as the Part and Product Renaming import. Relabeling a warehouse no longer means renaming locations one at a time.
Faster Product module. Large catalogs open and load noticeably faster, with lower memory use.
REST API. Sales order search now returns order total, currency code, and multi-currency total. PO and SO search responses flag records that belong to a read-only location group, and transfer order endpoints can return those records. Transfer orders gain request, unrequest, and close-short actions, and a unit cost on a transfer order item now applies for non-inventory items on ship-type transfers. On the fix side, the SO, PO, and MO search endpoints were dropping orders dated on the end date of the search range. If an integration polls “today’s orders” using today as the end date, it was silently missing them until now.

Fixes we’d flag

Receiving Data import went back to receiving only the first line per part when a PO had one product split across multiple lines, a regression from 25.9. It now receives every line into its own location with its own tracking, including drop ship and transfer order receipts.
Landed cost by volume ignored each part’s dimension unit of measure, so parts measured in different units got the wrong share. It now converts, and shows a clear error if a conversion is missing.
Landed cost on a zero-cost PO line could round to a negative landed cost. This is fixed in 26.8.
Fishbowl Payments links requested the full order total even when payments were already recorded, and did not refresh after an in-client payment. Both now use the remaining balance.
Read-only location groups. A user could flip the read-only flag on their own location group assignments without edit rights to the User module. Changing that flag now requires User module edit access.
Reports. The On Hand By Date and Item History reports both mishandled voided shipments, one leaving the returned quantity out and the other showing voids as upward adjustments. The Sales Production Demand report, which got a unit-of-measure fix last month, now also excludes estimates and fulfilled items and filters by scheduled date. The Adjustment Report says “Standard Cost Adj” on standard costing databases instead of mislabeling everything as average cost. And the Vendor Fulfillment History PO Count column no longer always reads 1.
Work orders. Splitting a large repair work order produced wrong finished good quantities on the traveler, drifting further with each split. 26.8 corrects the quantities. Reconciling a part consumed on a work order with more than one finished good used to fail partway through; it is now blocked up front with a clear message.
Parts. Changing a part’s unit of measure while it is on an open transfer order is now blocked, matching the existing rule for open sales and purchase orders. Image saves failed for Windows users whose account folder contains a period; this is fixed.

The upgrade notes are unchanged from last month. MySQL 8.0 is past end of life but still supported through the September release, so the auto-update keeps your current MySQL install. MySQL 5.7 is not supported. Upgrades from 2025.9 or older need the server updated by hand before clients. And Fishbowl Anywhere users should stay on 2025.9.

This is the second release in a row where the meaningful changes are in how Fishbowl talks to your accounting system. Each of these fixes describes something that was posting wrong before, so if you process credit returns, reconcile POs with landed cost, or run FIFO, some of that is probably already in your books. If you want a second set of eyes on whether your Fishbowl and QuickBooks numbers tie, get in touch.