TowingBossPro Blog — Impound & Storage

Knowing Exactly What Is in Your Impound Lot and Since When

Walk your lot with a clipboard some slow Sunday and compare what is there with what your records say is there. Most operators who try this once never forget the result. There is always a car nobody can explain, and usually one the records say is there that left weeks ago.

An accurate inventory is the foundation of everything else in storage. In Impound & Storage Software: The Complete Guide for Towing Companies we laid out the whole picture. This article is about the first piece: knowing what is in the lot and since when.

Why Lot Inventories Drift

Inventories drift for boring reasons. A driver drops a car after hours and the tow sheet goes in the truck door pocket. A release happens on a Saturday and nobody crosses it off the whiteboard. A body shop moves a vehicle out with a phone call and a handshake. A car gets moved from the front row to the back fence and the note about where it is ends up on a sticky note.

Each slip is small. Added up over a few months, they leave you with vehicles nobody is billing, vehicles nobody can find, and a front office that answers "do you have my car" with "let me go look."

The worst part is that drift is invisible until it costs you. The car nobody is billing does not complain. The record for a car that already left does not cause trouble until an owner calls about it and your clerk says "yes, it is here" and sends them across town for nothing.

Start the Record at the Call, Not at the Gate

The fix is to make the record exist before the car reaches the lot. In TowingBossPro every call has a pickup and a drop-off address. When the drop-off is your storage lot, the vehicle is headed for storage from the moment the call is created, with the vehicle details already attached: year, make, model, color, plate and VIN.

The driver does not have to remember to start a storage record. The office does not have to type one in from a paper sheet the next morning. The car and its record arrive together.

The Storage Start Date Is the "Since When"

Knowing what is in the lot is half the question. The other half is how long it has been there. Each stored vehicle in TowingBossPro has a storage start date, and the software counts the storage days from it. That one field answers the questions owners, accounts and your own staff ask most: how long has this been here and what does it owe.

Get in the habit of checking that every stored vehicle has a start date. A stored car with no start date is a car that will either be billed wrong or not billed at all.

Use the Records to Answer the Phone

The real test of an inventory is the phone. Someone calls and says their gray sedan was towed from an apartment complex last night. With records tied to calls, the office can search by plate, by vehicle details or by the account that ordered it, and answer in seconds: yes, it is here, it came in last night, this is what it will take to get it out.

That speed matters more than it seems. A caller who gets a straight answer the first time does not call back four times, does not show up angry at the gate, and is more likely to pay without a fight.

Tags for the Things a List Cannot Show

Some vehicles need a flag the basic record does not cover: a police hold, a vehicle waiting on an insurance adjuster, a car with a dead battery that needs a jump to move, a vehicle with keys versus without. Tags and custom fields in TowingBossPro let you mark those things in a way the whole office can see and filter by. Keep the list short and agree on the names, or tags turn into a second junk drawer.

Do the Count Anyway

Software does not replace walking the lot. It makes the walk fast. Pull the list of vehicles currently in storage, walk the rows, and check each one off. Anything on the ground with no record, or any record with no car, gets fixed that day, not next month.

Do it weekly at first, then whenever things get busy. Once the count matches every time, you will trust your records enough to stop walking out to look every time the phone rings. That trust is the point of impound and storage software. The next article covers the field that makes the inventory pay: the storage start date.