TowingBossPro Blog — Impound & Storage

Impound & Storage Software: The Complete Guide for Towing Companies

Every towing company with a lot has the same quiet problem. Trucks go out, calls get run, and vehicles keep landing behind the fence. Some leave the next morning. Some sit for weeks. The money in those vehicles is real, but it only turns into revenue if somebody knows what is back there, when it came in and what it owes on the day the owner shows up.

This guide walks through what impound and storage software should do for a towing company, using how Impound & Storage Software works in TowingBossPro as the example. If you have ever let a car walk out the gate for the tow fee alone because nobody could say when it arrived, this is for you. Impound & Storage Software is the overview; this article is the long version.

What a Storage Lot Actually Needs to Track

Strip away everything else and a storage lot runs on a handful of facts per vehicle. What is it, exactly: year, make, model, color, plate and VIN. Where did it come from and why: the pickup address, the account that called it in, private property or police. When did storage start. What does it cost per day. What did it look like when it arrived. And who is allowed to take it home.

Paper logbooks and whiteboards hold some of this. A spreadsheet holds more. The trouble is that none of them connect the facts to the invoice. A whiteboard does not know that a car has been on the lot for nineteen days, and a spreadsheet will not stop the night guy from releasing it for the tow fee alone. Software earns its keep when the record and the bill are the same thing.

The Call Comes First

In TowingBossPro a stored vehicle does not start life as a storage record. It starts as a call. Every call has a pickup address and a drop-off address, and for impound work the drop-off is your own storage lot. The call carries the vehicle details, the customer or commercial account that ordered it, and the photos your driver takes at the pickup.

That matters because the lot never gets a vehicle it has no paperwork for. The driver hooks the car, takes the photos in the driver app, drops it at the yard, and the record is already there with the vehicle details on it. Nobody types it in again at the end of the shift from a crumpled tow sheet.

Storage Start Date and Daily Rate

The two numbers that drive storage revenue are the storage start date and the daily storage rate. Each stored vehicle in TowingBossPro has both. The software counts the number of storage days and adds them to the invoice, so the bill reflects how long the car actually sat instead of whatever somebody remembered.

Set the start date honestly and consistently. If your rule is that storage starts the day the vehicle arrives, apply that every time. How days are counted, and what you are allowed to charge per day, varies by state and city, and some places cap storage fees or set rules for police-ordered tows. Check your local law before you set rates, and write your policy down so the whole office follows the same one.

Vehicle Records and Photos

The vehicle record is your defense when an owner says the scratch on the door was not there yesterday. Year, make, model, color, plate and VIN on every call, plus photos from the driver app, give you a clean picture of what came in and in what condition.

Photos also settle the arguments that never make it to a complaint. When the owner can see their own bumper hanging off in a time-stamped photo from the pickup, the conversation at the release window gets a lot shorter.

Accounts: Police, Property Managers and Shops

Most impound and storage volume comes through accounts. A police department or municipality orders tows. A property manager calls in cars parked where they should not be. Body shops, dealers and motor clubs send vehicles that sit for a while. TowingBossPro keeps commercial accounts with their calls and invoices under the account, so you can see everything a property manager has sent you this month or what a body shop owes for storage without hunting.

Release Day and Customer Texts

Release day is where storage revenue is won or lost. The rule every experienced lot operator learns the hard way: collect before the keys go out. With storage days already counted on the invoice, the person at the window is not guessing at the total. The customer can pay at the counter, or pay online through the customer app before they arrive, and the payment is recorded against the invoice.

Automated texts and two-way texting let you tell owners where their vehicle is, what they need to bring and when the lot is open, and let them text back with questions instead of tying up your phone line. The rest of this guide series goes deep on each piece, one topic at a time. Start with the storage lot inventory in the next article, and keep the Impound & Storage Software page handy for the overview.