TowingBossPro Blog — Impound & Storage

Using Your Storage Lot as the Drop-Off Address on a Tow Call

A tow is a move from one place to another. Most software for service businesses only knows about one address per job, which is fine for a plumber and useless for a tow company. You need to know where the car is and where it is going.

In Vehicle Photos at Pickup: Protecting Your Impound Lot From Damage Claims we looked at photos at the pickup. This article is about the other end of the trip: the drop-off, and why your own storage lot should be a first-class destination on every call that ends there.

Every Call Has Two Addresses

In TowingBossPro, every call has a pickup address and a drop-off address. The pickup is where the vehicle is. The drop-off is where it ends up: a body shop, a dealer, the owner's house, or your own storage lot.

When the drop-off is your lot, the call already tells you the vehicle is going into storage. Dispatch knows it, the driver knows it, and the office knows to expect a storage record with a start date and a daily rate.

Set Your Lot Up Once

If you have one yard, set its address up once and use it every time. If you have more than one storage location, set each one up with a clear name so the driver and the office never wonder which yard a car went to. "North Yard" and "Main Lot" are better than two addresses that look almost the same.

The point is that nobody types your own lot's address from memory at two in the morning. A typo in a customer's address is a problem. A typo in your own address means the system does not match the car to the lot.

If you sometimes hold vehicles somewhere temporary, like an overflow yard during a busy season, set that up as its own named location too. When the overflow closes and the cars come back to the main lot, the move is a call like any other, and the record shows where each vehicle has been.

Dispatch Sees Where Trucks Are Headed

On the dispatch board, organized by truck and day, a call bound for your storage lot looks different from one bound for a body shop across town. Dispatchers plan around that. A truck dropping at your own yard is back in service quickly. A truck heading to a shop forty minutes away is not.

The Waiting List of incoming calls on a live map shows where pickups are, which helps you decide which truck should take an impound pull based on how far it is from both the pickup and your lot.

That same view helps at the end of a busy night. Dispatch can see how many calls are ending at the lot, which tells the yard person how many cars to expect and whether there is room in the rows where you normally put fresh impounds. A lot that knows what is coming can stay organized.

Drivers Know the Plan Before They Hook

When a driver opens the call in the driver app, they see the pickup, the drop-off and the vehicle details. For an impound headed to your lot, they know to run the full photo set, confirm the plate and VIN, and drop the vehicle where your lot procedure says it goes.

There is no "where am I taking this?" call to dispatch, and no car dropped at the wrong yard.

Changing the Drop-Off Mid-Call

Plans change. An owner shows up while the car is on the hook. An account tells you to take a vehicle to a shop instead of the lot. Update the drop-off on the call when that happens so the record matches reality. If the car never reached your lot, it should not end up with a storage start date. If it was going to a shop and ended up in your yard instead, it needs one.

Local rules may say what a driver must do if an owner arrives during a private property tow, including what you can charge. Check what applies where you operate and train drivers on it.

The Drop-Off Ties It All Together

The drop-off address is what links dispatch to storage. Calls ending at your lot become stored vehicles. Stored vehicles get start dates and daily rates. Storage days end up on the invoice. All of it starts with picking the right drop-off when the call is created.

Read how the drop-off fits into the storage workflow on the Impound & Storage Software page. Next, a close look at private property impounds from call to release.