TowingBossPro Blog — Impound & Storage

Moving Your Current Impound Lot Into Software With a CSV Import

The hardest day to switch to software is the day you already have forty cars in the lot. Nobody wants to stop and rebuild everything, and nobody wants to lose track of a vehicle in the switch. But the longer you wait, the more cars there are.

Impound and Storage Reports: Seeing What the Lot Actually Earns was about what reports can tell you once your records are in. This article is about getting them in.

Start With Customers and Accounts

TowingBossPro supports CSV import, so the customer and account list you already have in a spreadsheet or an old system does not need to be typed in by hand. Export what you have, clean it up and import it.

Clean up first. Remove duplicates, fix obviously wrong phone numbers and decide how you want to name accounts. If one property management company shows up three different ways in your old records, pick one now. Bad data imported is still bad data.

Decide what goes in as an account before you import. Police agencies, property managers, body shops, dealers and motor clubs all belong as commercial accounts, so their future calls and invoices land in the right place. Getting this right at the start saves you from moving records around later.

Set Up Your Lot and Rates

Before you add any vehicles, set up your storage lot as a drop-off location and write down your rate sheet. Check your local rules on storage fees before you decide on rates. Having this ready means every vehicle you enter goes in the same way.

Write down the start-date rule too, so everyone entering existing vehicles applies it the same way. If one person counts from the tow date and another from the day the car reached the yard, your first batch of invoices will be inconsistent.

Record the Vehicles Already in the Lot

This is the part that matters most. Walk the lot with your old records in hand and make sure every vehicle on the ground gets a record in TowingBossPro with its details: year, make, model, color, plate and VIN.

The most important field is the storage start date. Use the actual date each vehicle came in, from your old records, not the day you entered it. If you use the day you switched, you just gave away every storage day before that. Set the daily storage rate that applies to each vehicle, and the software counts storage days from the start date and adds them to the invoice.

If a vehicle's start date is uncertain, note it and how you decided. That matters if the bill is ever challenged.

Do the walk with two people if you can: one reading plates, VINs and descriptions, one entering. It goes faster and catches more mistakes. Expect to find a vehicle or two your old records missed, and at least one record for a vehicle that is no longer there. Both are useful discoveries.

Photos of What Is Already There

Vehicles that came in before the switch may not have pickup photos in the new system. Take a fresh set during the walk. They do not replace pickup photos, but they document the current condition from the day the record starts.

Note on each record that the photos were taken at the switch, not at pickup, and keep any older paper records or photos for those vehicles until they leave. If a damage question comes up, you will want everything you have.

Run Both for a Short Time

For the first week or two, keep your old method running alongside the new one. Check them against each other daily. Once every vehicle matches and new calls are flowing into TowingBossPro cleanly, retire the old system.

Do not run both for months. Two sources of truth eventually means none.

Pick a cutover date and tell everyone. After that date, every new call goes into TowingBossPro only. The old system is for reference while the remaining vehicles leave, nothing more.

Train the Whole Team

Everyone who touches a vehicle needs to know the new habits: drivers take photos and record details in the driver app, the office sets the start date and rate at drop-off, the release window collects from the invoice. TowingBossPro is never billed per user, so every driver, dispatcher and lot person can have access without your bill going up.

A careful switch takes a few days of effort and then pays every day after. See what you are moving to on the Impound & Storage Software page. Next: building clean storage invoices.