TowingBossPro Blog — Accounts & Customers

Custom Fields for Tow Accounts: Capturing PO Numbers, Contacts and Account Rules

Every account has its quirks. One dealer wants a stock number on every invoice. A fleet wants its unit number. A motor club wants its job number. A property manager wants the name of whoever authorized the tow. A body shop wants the repair order. Standard fields cannot cover all of that, and putting it in free-text notes means it gets missed half the time.

Tags for Tow Accounts: Sorting Customers So You Can Act on the List covered tags, which group customers. Custom fields do something different: they hold the specific details each account needs.

What Custom Fields Are For

A custom field is a field you define yourself. TowingBossPro supports custom fields, so you can add the boxes your business actually uses instead of making do with "notes." Because a custom field is a named field, it gets filled in consistently and can show up in the same place every time.

The difference from notes is discipline. A note might say "PO 4471" one day and "po#4471" the next, or nothing at all. A field called "Account reference" prompts the dispatcher to fill it in, the same way, every time.

The difference from tags is precision. A tag says this customer is a fleet. A custom field says this call was for unit 214.

Common Custom Fields for Tow Companies

The right custom fields depend on your accounts, but these come up again and again:

• Account reference — the PO, repair order, stock, job or case number the account uses
• Unit number — for fleets and rental companies
• Authorized by — who requested or authorized the tow, especially on property and agency work
• Invoice approver — who at the account approves payment
• Preferred drop-off — the account's usual shop or yard, when it is not obvious
• Referral source — where the customer came from

Notice how many of these come back to the same question: what will the account ask about later? If an account will ever call and say "what happened with number such-and-such," that number deserves a field.

You will not need all of them, and you may need others. Start with the ones your biggest accounts ask about.

Account-Level vs. Call-Level Details

Some details belong to the account and do not change from call to call: who approves invoices, how they want to pay, the preferred drop-off yard. Others change with every call: the PO number, the unit, the case number.

Think about which is which before you create a field. Putting a call-specific detail on the account means it gets overwritten; putting an account-wide detail on every call means retyping it. Getting this right once saves your dispatchers a lot of small annoyances.

Keep the List Short

Every custom field is one more thing someone has to fill in, often on a busy night with a stressed caller on the line. Add a field only when you can name who uses it and why. If a field sits empty on most records, either nobody needs it or nobody understands it.

Train new dispatchers on the fields too. A field everyone understands gets filled in; a field nobody explained gets skipped. A two-minute walkthrough during onboarding is enough.

Review your fields every few months. Remove the ones that are not being used, and rename the ones people find confusing. Short, clear field names work best: "Unit #" beats "Fleet Vehicle Internal Identification Number."

Custom Fields on Invoices

Many account-specific details exist because the account needs them on the invoice. A dealer cannot pay an invoice without the stock number; a fleet cannot approve one without the unit. Keep the reference fields consistent so the right details are captured on the call and are right there when you build the invoice.

When an account complains that invoices are hard to process, ask what they need to see. The answer is often a single reference number you could have captured all along.

Custom Fields Make Records Searchable

A detail in a named field is far easier to find than one buried in notes. When a fleet manager asks about unit 214 or a dealer asks about stock number 8812, you can locate it quickly. When an agency asks about a case number, you have it.

Referral source is worth a special mention. It is easy to skip and hard to recover later. Knowing that your three best accounts all came from referrals by one body shop tells you exactly whose relationship to protect.

Over time, consistent custom fields turn your records into something you can rely on, not just something you keep. They are a small but powerful part of towing account management software. Next, we look at what all of these records add up to: reports by account.