Starter Plan: Scale Your Fishbowl Order Intake Without Adding Headcount

For small wholesale distributors running Fishbowl Inventory, growth creates a problem that nobody talks about enough.

When order volume increases — more vendors, more customers, more SKUs — the manual work increases right along with it. More PDFs to enter. More lines to type. More opportunities for errors. More hours spent on data entry instead of the work that actually grows the business.

The traditional solution is to hire more people. But adding headcount to handle data entry is expensive, slow, and doesn't actually fix the underlying problem. It just adds more hands to a broken process.

There's a better way.

The Order Intake Bottleneck

Most small distributors on Fishbowl reach a point where their order intake process becomes the ceiling on how fast they can grow. It's not warehouse capacity. It's not Fishbowl itself. It's the hours required to manually enter every incoming order into the system.

A team of two or three people can handle a certain volume of manual entry before they're at capacity. When order volume grows beyond that, something has to give — either you hire, you fall behind, or you start making more errors because everyone's rushing.

This is the order intake bottleneck. And it's entirely solvable without adding a single person to your team.

What the Truss Starter Plan Does

The Truss Starter Plan is built for small wholesale distributors who are ready to automate their Fishbowl order intake without committing to an enterprise software contract.

At $299/month, the Starter Plan includes:

• Up to 150 orders per month — enough for most small distribution operations (additional orders $1 each)
• 200 SKU mappings — covers your core vendor catalog
• 3 team members — your core operations crew
• Email support

Every plan includes the full Truss feature set: AI-powered PDF and photo extraction, direct Fishbowl API sync for Sales Orders, Purchase Orders, and Transfer Orders, Smart SKU Matching, and the human approval workflow.

Who the Starter Plan Is For

The Starter Plan is the right fit if you are:

• Processing up to 150 orders per month. That's roughly 7 orders per business day — a common volume for small distributors with a focused vendor and customer base.
• Working with a small team. Three team members covers most small operations: an owner or operations manager plus one or two people handling order intake and fulfillment.
• Building your SKU mapping library. The 200 SKU mapping limit covers your most common vendor part numbers. As you process orders through Truss, your mapping library builds automatically — confirmed matches carry forward indefinitely.
• Ready to stop spending hours on data entry. If your team is manually entering Fishbowl orders from vendor PDFs and you're tired of the errors and the time it takes, the Starter Plan gets you to automation immediately.

The Math on $299/Month

Let's put the Starter Plan cost in context.

If your team spends an average of 15 minutes per order on manual data entry — which is conservative for a multi-line vendor PO — 150 orders per month represents about 37-38 hours of manual entry time.

At $15-20/hour in labor cost, that's $560-750 per month in pure transcription labor. The Starter Plan at $299/month costs about half of that — and eliminates the errors that manual entry introduces on top of it.

For a team at that volume, the subscription typically pays for itself within the month.

How Scaling Works on the Starter Plan

One of the most common questions from new Truss users is: what happens when my order volume grows?

The answer is straightforward. When your monthly order volume consistently approaches the 150-order limit, it's a signal that your business is growing — and that's exactly when upgrading to the Professional Plan makes sense.

Orders over your limit are $1 each, so a busy month never stops your team. The Professional Plan at $499/month supports up to 400 orders per month, unlimited SKU mappings, and up to 7 team members. Upgrading takes one click and your entire SKU mapping library, order history, and settings carry forward automatically. Nothing gets lost in the transition.

Getting Started in Minutes

Connecting Truss to your Fishbowl instance takes about 10 minutes. You'll need your Fishbowl server credentials and a Cloudflare tunnel or equivalent to expose your local Fishbowl database securely. Once connected, upload any vendor PDF and watch it land in Fishbowl as a synced order.

Book a demo at trussapp.online and we'll walk through Truss on your own vendor orders, then set up your account and connect your Fishbowl instance with you.

Starter Plan at a Glance

Feature	Starter Plan
Monthly price	$299/month
Orders per month	Up to 150 (additional orders $1 each)
SKU mappings	200
Team members	3
Support	Email
Order types	SO, PO, TO
Fishbowl API sync	✓
Human approval workflow	✓
Smart SKU Matching	✓
AI PDF + photo extraction	✓