TowingBossPro Blog — Accounts & Customers

Multiple Locations per Tow Customer: Body Shops, Lots and Branches

The bigger an account gets, the more addresses it has. A dealer group has stores across town. A fleet has a main yard and two satellite lots. A property manager covers a dozen buildings. A regional body shop chain has three shops and a storage lot. Treating each address as its own customer splits the history and makes billing a mess.

In Setting Up a Tow Account Record: What Belongs on It From Day One, we added locations when setting up an account. This article looks at why multiple locations per customer is the right model and how to manage it as accounts grow.

One Relationship, Many Addresses

The relationship is with the business. The work happens at its addresses. If a dealer group's service director calls you for a car going from the north store to the south store, that call belongs to the dealer group — but both addresses matter for dispatch.

TowingBossPro lets one customer have multiple locations. The calls and invoices stay under the one account, and each location is ready to pick as a pickup or drop-off. Reports by account show the whole relationship, not a fraction of it.

Pickup and Drop-Off From the Same Account

Every call has a pickup address and a drop-off address, and with multi-location accounts both are often saved locations. Lot-to-lot moves, shop-to-shop transfers, yard-to-dealer runs: the dispatcher picks both from the account instead of typing two addresses during a busy shift.

It also keeps calls honest. When a lot-to-lot move is recorded with two saved locations, anyone reviewing the account later can see exactly where each vehicle went without reading free-text notes or guessing which store "south" meant that week.

That cuts typos, which matter more in towing than in most trades. A wrong suite number or a missing "rear entrance" sends a driver around the block with a car on the deck, and that is time no one gets paid for.

Notes That Belong to the Location

Each location has its own quirks. The north store takes drop-offs at the service drive; the south store wants them behind the body shop building. The fleet's main yard has a gate code; the satellite lot is open. Keep those notes on the location, not on the account, so the driver sees the right instructions for the right address.

When notes change, update them on the location. One edit fixes every future call.

Naming Locations So Dispatch Can Find Them

Name each location the way your team refers to it: "North Store," "Fleet Yard — Main," "Building C," "Storage Lot." A list of five identical addresses with different suite numbers is a slow pick at 3 a.m.; a list of clear names is fast.

• Use short, distinct names your dispatchers already say
• Put the most-used location first in your mind when naming — it will be picked most
• Keep entrance, gate and key notes on each location
• Remove or rename locations the account no longer uses

When a Location Should Be Its Own Account

Sometimes two addresses share a brand but not a relationship. A franchise body shop may be independently owned, with its own manager who approves its own invoices. In that case, two accounts make more sense than one account with two locations, because the billing and the decision-maker are separate.

The reverse happens too. A property management company may look like a dozen separate apartment complexes to your drivers, but one regional office approves every invoice. That is one account with a dozen locations, not a dozen accounts, and setting it up that way means one place to look when the regional manager asks what you did for them last quarter.

The test is simple: who approves and pays the invoice? If it is the same person or office, use one account with multiple locations. If it is different, use separate accounts and tag them so you can still see them as a group.

Locations Make Account History Useful

With locations set up correctly, the account history becomes a map of how a customer uses you: which stores call most, which routes repeat, which locations sit quiet. That is the kind of insight a spreadsheet never gives you.

Review the locations on your largest accounts a couple of times a year. Ask the account contact whether any addresses have opened, closed or changed how they take deliveries. It is a quick conversation that shows you pay attention, and it keeps your saved locations from slowly drifting out of date.

Multiple locations are a core part of TowingBossPro's towing account management software, and they connect directly to the next topic: repeat locations — the specific addresses your trucks visit every week, whether or not they belong to one account.