TowingBossPro Blog — Towing Software

Drivers, Trucks and the Time Clock: Adding Capacity Without Losing Track

The jump from two trucks to four is where a lot of towing companies get into trouble. With two trucks, the owner can hold everything in his head. With four, he can't, and the paper systems that worked fine start dropping calls, misplacing hours and losing track of which truck did what.

In Reports and Call Categories That Show How Your Towing Company Really Runs, we covered reading the numbers. This article covers the people and equipment behind them.

Employees and Trucks as Records

In TowingBossPro, employees and trucks are part of the system, not names on a whiteboard. Each call gets assigned to a driver and a truck together, so you always know who handled it and in what. When a driver moves between trucks, the record still lines up.

Adding a new driver or a new truck takes a few minutes. Once they're in, they show up as options on the dispatch board, and the new driver gets the driver app with his calls in order from the first shift.

Trucks as records also help with the unglamorous side of running a fleet. When a truck goes to the shop, dispatch knows not to assign to it. When you're deciding whether a unit is worth another year of repairs, you can see how much work it has actually done. And when a customer asks which truck came to their call, the answer is on the call.

The Time Clock

Hours are one of the biggest costs in a towing company and one of the sloppiest records. Drivers write times on a sheet, forget, round, or reconstruct the week on Friday from memory. That's bad for payroll and bad for knowing what a call actually cost you.

TowingBossPro includes a time clock, so hours live in the same system as the calls. That gives you a cleaner payroll record and a clearer picture of how many hours of driver time your call volume actually takes. Wage and hour rules vary by state, so set up your pay practices to match what applies to you.

When to Add a Truck

Adding a truck is a big decision, and it's one that reports make much easier. Look at how long calls wait on the Waiting List at your busiest times, how many calls each truck completes and whether you're turning away work. If calls routinely wait too long while every truck is busy, you probably need capacity. If some trucks sit idle while others are overloaded, you might need better dispatch instead.

Look at categories too. If the calls you're missing are roadside, a service truck may be a better buy than another rollback. If they're transports, the answer may be a flatbed that can be scheduled ahead.

Bringing On a New Driver

New drivers usually learn the company from the senior driver in the passenger seat. That still matters, but a lot of what they used to learn by riding along now lives in the system: saved locations with drop-off notes, vehicle details on every call, access notes and one-tap navigation.

Keep their first week simple. Tap start and complete. Take photos at pickup and drop-off. Send the on-the-way and arrival texts. Everything else comes with time.

Check in at the end of each of his first few shifts. Look at his calls on the board together: were they all completed, do they have photos, did the texts go out? Ten minutes of review in week one saves a lot of correction in month three, and it tells the new driver that the app is how your company works, not an optional extra.

Bringing Your Records With You

If you're switching from a spreadsheet or another system as you grow, CSV import brings your customer list in without retyping. Add your repeat locations and your commercial accounts, then your employees and trucks, and you can run tomorrow's calls from the new system.

Do it before the growth spurt, not during. Switching systems while adding trucks and drivers at the same time is twice the disruption.

Growth Without a Per-Seat Bill

Some software charges per user, which means every new driver or dispatcher makes the bill bigger. That quietly discourages giving everyone access, and that's exactly the opposite of what a growing towing company needs. TowingBossPro is never billed per user. Plans are Start at $59 a month, Pro at $89 and Crew at $199, and every plan starts with a 14-day free trial with no credit card.

Growth should mean more calls and more revenue, not more chaos. For how the people and trucks fit with the rest of the system, see the towing software page.