TowingBossPro Blog — Towing Software

Managing Commercial Accounts at a Towing Company

For many towing companies, the steady money isn't the random breakdown on the interstate. It's the accounts: the motor club calls, the dealership that moves units every week, the body shops, the property manager who needs cars removed from a lot, the city or county work. Those relationships keep trucks busy on slow days — and they're also where invoices get lost.

In Repeat Locations: Body Shops, Dealerships and Lots in Your Towing Software, we covered saving the places you tow to. This article covers the customers who send you work over and over.

Why Accounts Get Messy on Paper

A one-time customer pays and is done. An account generates a stream of calls, each with a different vehicle, a different pickup and often a different person calling it in. At month end, someone has to gather every call for that account, make sure each was billed, and send a statement that matches the account's own records.

On paper, that means sorting call sheets by hand, and it is very easy for a call or two to slip through. Multiply by several accounts and the leak is real.

There is also the opposite problem: billing an account for a call that should have gone to the vehicle owner, or billing the same call twice because two people each wrote it down. Accounts notice those mistakes, and every one of them costs you a little trust and a lot of back-and-forth to fix.

Calls and Invoices Under the Account

In TowingBossPro, commercial accounts — motor clubs, police and municipal customers, body shops, dealers and property managers — keep their calls and invoices under the account. When dispatch creates a call for an account, it belongs to that account from the start.

At any point, you can see everything you have done for a dealer this month, what has been invoiced and what is still open. No sorting, no stack of carbons.

It also helps dispatch. When a dealership calls, the dispatcher picks the account and the call is already tied to the right customer, with the dealer's lot as a saved location. The person calling might be a different service writer every time, but the account stays the same, and so does the billing.

Different Accounts, Different Needs

Every type of account works a little differently, and it helps to think about what each one cares about:

• Dealerships care about which unit moved where and when, so vehicle details and VINs on every call matter.
• Body shops care about when the car arrives and that it arrived as described, which is where drop-off photos help.
• Property managers care about a clean record of which vehicles were removed from which lot.
• Motor clubs and municipal customers usually have their own paperwork expectations; keep the details they require on each call.

TowingBossPro doesn't connect to motor club or police dispatch systems; those calls get entered like any other. What it does is keep every call and invoice organized under the right account so the billing side is clean.

Billing an Account Without the Month-End Scramble

Because calls live under the account, invoicing becomes routine. Completed calls turn into invoices with the vehicle and service details already attached. Accounts that pay by card can keep a card on file, and auto-billing handles those that work that way. Payment follow-ups chase the ones that don't.

The result is fewer surprises at month end. You know what each account owes before they ask, and they get invoices that match their own records.

Accounts that are slow to pay usually aren't trying to stiff you. Their invoice landed in a pile, or the person who approves it was out that week. A polite automatic reminder at the right time often does more than an awkward phone call from the owner, and it happens without anyone in your office having to remember.

Seeing Which Accounts Are Worth It

Not every account is a good one. Some send steady, easy work and pay on time. Others send long-distance calls at low rates and pay slowly. When calls and invoices are organized by account, you can see the difference in your reports: how much work each account sends, what categories it falls into and how much is outstanding.

That is the information you need to decide which relationships to grow, which rates to revisit and which accounts to drop.

Setting Up Your Accounts

Start with your five biggest accounts. Add each as a customer, note who calls in work and how they want to be billed, and save their locations — the dealer's lot, the shop's drop-off area. From then on, every call for that account goes under it.

Within a month, you'll have a clear history for each account instead of a pile of paper. For how accounts connect to dispatch, storage and invoicing, see the towing software overview.