TowingBossPro Blog — Towing Software

Reports and Call Categories That Show How Your Towing Company Really Runs

Most towing owners have a gut feeling about their business. Roadside is busy in winter. The dealer account is steady. Recovery work pays well when it comes. Gut feelings are useful, but they're often wrong in the details, and the details are where the decisions live: whether to buy another truck, whether an account is worth keeping, whether your rates have fallen behind.

In Card on File, Auto-Billing and Online Payments for Towing Companies, we covered getting paid. This article covers seeing the whole business at once.

Categories Give Your Calls Shape

Every call in TowingBossPro can be put in a category. The towing categories are:

• Light-Duty Tows
• Heavy-Duty Tows
• Roadside — jump start, lockout, tire change, fuel delivery and winch-out
• Accident & Recovery
• Impound & Storage
• Transports

Categorizing every call takes no extra time at intake and pays off every time you look at a report. It also makes the dispatch board easier to read, because a roadside call and a heavy-duty tow look different at a glance.

What Mix Is Your Business?

The first question reports answer is simple: what kind of work do you actually do? Owners are often surprised. A company that thinks of itself as light-duty might find a big share of revenue coming from storage. A company that thinks roadside is a sideline might find it's half the calls but a much smaller share of the money.

Neither answer is good or bad on its own. But you can't decide where to grow — or what to stop doing — without knowing the mix.

Compare calls to revenue by category, not just call counts. A category with lots of calls and modest revenue might still be worth it if the calls are quick and keep trucks moving between bigger jobs. A category with few calls and big revenue might deserve more attention — better intake, faster response, a closer relationship with the accounts that send it. The point is to make those calls on purpose instead of by accident.

Four Numbers to Check Every Week

You don't need a dashboard full of charts. A few numbers, checked every week, cover most of what an owner needs:

• Calls completed, by category, compared with last week.
• Revenue invoiced, and how much of it has been paid.
• Outstanding invoices, especially from accounts.
• Vehicles in storage and how long they've been there.

If those four look healthy, the business is probably healthy. If one jumps, you know where to look.

Accounts and Trucks

With calls kept under commercial accounts, you can see how much work each account sends and how much it owes. That makes it obvious which accounts are carrying the business and which are slow payers that need a conversation.

Because calls are assigned to a driver and a truck, you can also see how much work each truck does. A truck that consistently does fewer calls might be on the wrong routes, might be spending too long in the shop, or might be a truck you don't actually need.

Be careful how you use that information with drivers. Fewer calls on a truck isn't automatically a driver problem; the heavy wrecker will always do fewer calls than the service truck, and a driver who gets all the long recoveries will look slow on paper. Use the numbers to ask better questions, not to hand out blame.

Seasons and Patterns

Towing is seasonal in ways that vary by region: dead batteries in the first cold snap, overheating in summer heat, storms that bring recovery work, holidays that bring highway breakdowns. Looking at categories over months shows your own patterns, which helps you plan staffing and maintenance around them instead of being surprised every year.

Those patterns are also a good argument for keeping your records clean. A season of good data is worth more than any rule of thumb.

After a full year, you can compare this October with last October instead of with last month. That comparison is the honest one for a seasonal business, and it is the one that tells you whether the company is actually growing or just riding the weather.

Reports Are Only as Good as the Calls

All of this depends on calls being recorded properly: categorized, assigned, completed and invoiced. That's the quiet benefit of running everything through one system. When the Waiting List, the dispatch board, the driver app and invoicing all use the same call record, the reports come for free.

Use them. Ten minutes a week with your numbers will teach you more about your company than a month of guessing. For how reporting fits into the full system, see the towing software overview.