TowingBossPro Blog — Roadside Assistance

Chasing Unpaid Roadside Invoices With Automatic Payment Follow-Ups

Nobody gets into towing to chase forty-dollar invoices. But if you run a lot of roadside calls, a handful of unpaid tickets every week adds up fast, and the time spent calling and emailing about each one costs more than the ticket. The answer is to make the chasing automatic and the paying easy.

Why Roadside Invoices Slip

Roadside Reports: Finding Out Which Service Calls Actually Make Money showed how to spot unpaid invoices in your reports. Here is why they happen in the first place. The customer is relieved and in a hurry. The car starts and they drive away. The invoice arrives an hour later, after they have stopped thinking about you. Or nobody set the payment expectation on the phone, so they assumed they would get a bill in the mail.

Most unpaid roadside invoices are forgetfulness, not refusal. That is good news, because forgetfulness is easy to fix with a reminder.

Some slip on your side. The driver forgot to tap complete, so the office never knew the call was done. The invoice went to an old email address. The customer's number was a landline. Each of these is a process issue, and each shows up when you look at which invoices are unpaid and why.

Collect on Scene First

The best follow-up is the one you never need. Set the expectation at intake, send the invoice the moment the driver taps complete, and let the customer pay online from their phone while the driver is still there. For returning customers, charge the card on file.

Everything below is for the calls where that did not happen.

Track your same-day payment rate as a habit. When it drops, look at the last week of calls. Usually one step slipped, like invoices going out late on a busy day, and fixing it brings the rate back up without any extra chasing.

Automatic Payment Follow-Ups

TowingBossPro sends payment follow-ups on invoices that stay unpaid. Nobody in the office needs to keep a list or remember who owes what. The customer gets a reminder with a way to pay online, and most small invoices get paid after one or two.

That consistency matters. When reminders depend on someone remembering, the busy weeks are exactly the weeks they do not go out.

Reminders also keep your tone consistent. A person chasing a small debt on a bad day can come across harsher than they mean to. An automatic follow-up is polite and neutral every time, which protects the relationship with a customer who simply forgot.

Make Paying Effortless

A reminder only works if paying is easy. The customer can pay online from the reminder, or open the customer app, see their invoices and pay there. They can also save a card on file for next time. Every extra step between the reminder and the payment loses a few customers.

Check the invoice itself, too. If customers often reply with questions before paying, something on the invoice is unclear. Naming the call type, the vehicle and the location on the invoice answers most of those questions before they are asked.

Accounts Are Different

Commercial accounts usually pay on a schedule rather than per call. Keep their calls and invoices under the account, use card on file and auto-billing where you have an arrangement, and let payment follow-ups handle the overdue ones. When an account consistently pays late, look at it in your reports and decide whether the terms need to change.

Before setting up a new account with billing terms, agree on what happens when invoices go overdue. Having that conversation once, at the start, is much easier than having it for the first time when an account is three months behind.

When Reminders Do Not Work

A small number of customers will not pay. Before you decide what to do, look at the call record: the customer's name and number, the vehicle details, the photos, the text history and the price they were quoted or approved. Whatever your next step, you will want that record. Decide on a company policy for how far you chase small tickets, and apply it consistently.

The lesson for next time is usually at intake. The next article covers moving roadside calls off notepads and group texts. For invoicing, payments and follow-ups together, visit the roadside assistance software overview.