TowingBossPro Blog — Tow Dispatch

Tow Dispatch Reports: What to Review Every Week

Most towing owners have a feeling about how the week went. Busy, slow, rough, good. Feelings are not useless, but they are not reliable either. A week that felt crazy might have had fewer calls than usual and just one terrible recovery. A week that felt fine might have left a pile of unpaid invoices behind it.

A short weekly review of a few reports turns the feeling into facts you can act on.

Why a Weekly Review

The invoicing guide in From Completed Tow to Paid Invoice: Closing the Loop After Dispatch described closing the loop every day. The weekly review is the step back. Daily, you are making sure nothing falls through the cracks. Weekly, you are looking for patterns: what kinds of calls are growing, which trucks are carrying the load, where money is stuck.

Keep it short. Thirty minutes at the same time each week, ideally with whoever runs dispatch.

If your company has a separate dispatcher and owner, make the weekly review a shared habit. The dispatcher sees the day-to-day reasons behind the numbers, and the owner sees the bigger patterns. Together, the review usually turns up one or two things neither would have caught alone.

Calls by Category

Start with how many calls you ran and what kind: Light-Duty Tows, Heavy-Duty Tows, Roadside, Accident & Recovery, Impound & Storage and Transports. Watch the trend over several weeks. A growing share of roadside calls might mean a service truck would pay for itself. A rise in heavy-duty calls might mean you are turning work away when the heavy wrecker is busy.

Seasonal swings are normal. Compare against the same time last year once you have the history.

Category trends also show up by day and time. If heavy-duty calls cluster on certain days or roadside calls spike on cold mornings, that tells you when to have the right trucks and people available.

Truck and Driver Load

Look at how calls were split across trucks and drivers. If one truck consistently carries far more than the others, find out why. It may be the right equipment for most calls, or it may be that dispatchers default to it. If one truck is always light, maybe its equipment does not fit your call mix.

The time clock helps compare hours worked to calls completed, which is a fair way to see whether shifts are staffed right.

Pay attention to which trucks did which categories. If the heavy wrecker spent half its week on light-duty calls, that is a dispatch habit to fix before it costs you a heavy job.

Open and Stalled Calls

Check for calls that never got completed or sat on the Waiting List too long. A completed tow that was never marked complete is an invoice that never got sent. A call that sat on the Waiting List for hours is a customer who probably called someone else.

Each one is a small process lesson. Find out why it happened and fix the habit.

Look for cancellations too. A call canceled because the customer found another tow company after a long wait is a lost job that never shows up as revenue. Counting those helps you see what slow response times are really costing.

Storage, Accounts and Money

Review vehicles in storage and make sure the list matches what is actually in the yard. Look at each commercial account's activity: is a body shop or dealer sending less work than usual? A quick call now can save the relationship. Then look at unpaid invoices and confirm payment follow-ups are going out.

Money stuck in invoices is the easiest money to get back, and the weekly review is where you find it.

Finally, look at estimates that were sent but not approved, especially for transports and larger jobs. A short follow-up text on an estimate that has been sitting for a week often turns into scheduled work.

Turn Reports Into Decisions

A report you look at and do nothing with is just a chart. Leave every weekly review with one or two decisions: change a shift, adjust a quoting rule, call an account, chase a balance. Over a few months, those small decisions add up to a better-run company. The next guide covers the person who uses all of this every day: a new dispatcher.

For how reports fit with the rest of dispatch, visit the tow dispatch software page.