TowingBossPro Blog — Accounts & Customers

Repeat Locations: Saving the Addresses Your Tow Trucks Visit Every Week

Look at a month of your calls and you will see the same addresses over and over. The collision center on the highway frontage road. The dealer that takes customer cars for service. The fleet yard. The apartment complex. Your own storage lot. These are your repeat locations, and every time a dispatcher types one from scratch, you are paying for it in time and mistakes.

Multiple Locations per Tow Customer: Body Shops, Lots and Branches covered customers with several addresses. Here we focus on finding your repeat locations and turning them into saved locations that make dispatch faster.

Find Your Repeat Locations

Start with what you already have. Go through recent call sheets, invoices or the export from your old system and list the addresses that show up more than a couple of times a month. Most tow companies find that a few dozen addresses account for a large share of their drop-offs.

If you are moving off paper, ask your senior drivers too. They know which addresses come up constantly and which ones have tricky entrances, and they will name places that never made it onto a call sheet because the dispatcher just said "the usual spot."

Sort them into groups: body shops, dealerships, fleet yards, lots and properties, salvage and auction yards, and your own yard. Each one belongs to some customer, even if that customer is your own company.

Save Them on the Right Customer

A repeat location should live on the customer it belongs to. The collision center is a location under the collision center's account. The dealer's service drive is under the dealer. In TowingBossPro, customers can have multiple locations, so each account carries its own set.

Your own yard and storage lot deserve the same treatment. Save them as locations so a drop-off at your impound lot or a pickup from your storage yard is one pick, not a typed address — and so the record shows clearly when a vehicle went into your possession.

That way, when the account calls, its locations come up with it. And when a retail customer says "take it to the collision center on the frontage road," the dispatcher knows exactly which saved location that is.

Write Notes for the Driver Who Has Never Been There

The test for a good location note: could a driver on their first week find the right spot at night? Write for that driver.

• Which entrance or bay takes tow drop-offs
• After-hours instructions: key drop, where to leave the vehicle, who to call
• Gate codes if the account shares them
• Height or clearance issues for larger trucks
• Where not to park or unload

Notes that are short and specific beat long paragraphs. Drivers read them on a phone, often while moving.

Keep Locations Current

Shops move bays, dealers change their service entrance, gate codes rotate. A saved location with stale notes is worse than none, because the driver trusts it. Make updating notes part of the routine: when a driver reports a change, the office edits the location the same day.

Driver photos from the driver app also help. A photo of where the vehicle was left at a body shop after hours is proof of delivery and a reference for the next driver.

Repeat Locations on the Map

The Waiting List shows incoming calls on a live map, and the dispatch board shows what every truck is doing. When the drop-off for a call is a saved repeat location, the dispatcher can see at a glance which calls are heading toward the same shop and plan accordingly.

It also helps when a retail caller is unsure where they want the vehicle to go. A dispatcher can suggest a nearby body shop or dealer you already work with, pick it as the drop-off and send the customer a text with the address, all in a minute.

Over time, you learn which locations generate the most trips — useful when you think about where to stage trucks or which accounts deserve a visit.

Repeat Locations Build Repeat Relationships

The opposite is also true. Nothing loses a shop faster than a driver who drops a car in front of the customer entrance on a busy morning, or leaves keys somewhere they were never told about. Those are not driver problems so much as information problems, and saved locations are the fix.

A body shop notices when your drivers always put the car in the right spot and leave the keys where they asked. That consistency is what turns occasional calls into a standing relationship, and it comes directly from saved locations with good notes.

Repeat locations are one of the quiet workhorses of towing account management software. Next, we turn to the account type that sends the most volume for many companies: motor clubs.