TowingBossPro Blog — Impound & Storage

Impound and Storage Reports: Seeing What the Lot Actually Earns

A storage lot is a real estate business attached to a towing company. You pay for land, fencing, lights, insurance and the people who run it. Whether it earns its keep is a question most owners answer by feel, and feel is often wrong.

Tags and Custom Fields for Impound Holds and Lot Notes showed how tags and custom fields organize the lot. This article is about using reports to see what the lot is actually worth.

Billed Is Not Collected

The first number most owners look at is storage billed. It is the wrong place to stop. A lot full of long-stay vehicles nobody will pick up can show big storage numbers that will never become cash.

Look at billed and collected side by side. TowingBossPro reports on invoices and payments, so you can see how much storage you invoiced and how much was actually paid. The gap between them tells you more about your lot than either number alone.

Look at the gap by work type if you can. Private property impounds may collect at a high rate because owners need their cars. Long police holds and abandoned vehicles may collect far less. If one kind of storage consistently bills more than it collects, that is a business decision to look at, not just an accounting detail.

Revenue by Account

Because commercial accounts keep their calls and invoices together, you can see what each account is worth. Which property managers send the most impounds? Which body shops generate the most storage, and do they pay? Which police agency keeps you busiest?

This is how you decide where to spend your sales time. An account that sends a lot of work and pays promptly deserves attention. One that ties up the lot and pays late may need new terms.

Do not look only at totals. An account that sends fewer vehicles but pays on time and moves them quickly can be worth more than a bigger account that clogs the lot. Look at revenue, payment speed and how long their vehicles sit together.

Open Invoices and Aging

Reports on unpaid invoices show what is owed and how old it is. For storage, that usually means account invoices, since impound owners pay at the window. Review it weekly, and let payment follow-ups handle the routine reminders.

Put a name next to every account invoice older than your terms. Someone in the office should own each one until it is paid. Unowned invoices are the ones that quietly age past the point where anyone remembers the details.

How Long Vehicles Stay

Storage start dates tell you how long vehicles stay. Over time, you will see patterns: private property impounds that mostly leave within a day or two, police holds that sit for weeks, account vehicles that move when the adjuster finally shows up. Knowing your normal stay helps you spot the outliers and plan your space.

Watch for changes over time as well. If the typical stay for private property impounds starts to stretch, it may mean owners are struggling to pay, your release hours are inconvenient or your pickup messages are not clear. The data will tell you something changed; finding out why is up to you.

Tags Make Reports Sharper

If you tag vehicles by work type, like Private Property, Police or Account Storage, you can look at each type separately. Maybe private property work is your most profitable storage, or maybe police holds eat space with little return. You will not know until you split them apart.

Custom fields can help here too, as long as they are filled in consistently.

Tag consistently or not at all. A report split by tag is only accurate if every vehicle got the right tag. If half the private property impounds are untagged, the report will tell you a confident story that is wrong. Spot-check tags during the weekly lot walk.

Turn the Numbers Into Decisions

Reports are only worth something if they change what you do. A few questions to ask every quarter:

• Is storage revenue growing with the number of vehicles stored, or leaking?
• Which accounts should we grow, and which should we renegotiate?
• How many vehicles are long-stay, and what is the plan for each?
• Are our daily storage rates still right for our costs, within local rules?

None of this needs a spreadsheet expert. It needs records that were kept right in the first place, which is what everything earlier in this series was about.

See how reports fit with the full storage workflow on the Impound & Storage Software page. Next: moving your existing lot into software.