TowingBossPro Blog — Towing Software

Running Roadside Calls: Jump Starts, Lockouts, Tire Changes, Fuel and Winch-Outs

Roadside calls are the fast, small jobs that fill the gaps in a towing company's day: a jump start in a grocery store lot, a lockout at a gas station, a flat on the shoulder, a fuel delivery to someone who swore the gauge said a quarter tank, a winch-out from a muddy ditch. Each one is short, but a busy day can bring a lot of them.

In Getting Storage Days Onto the Invoice Every Time, we covered billing for vehicles that sit. This article is about the ones that leave under their own power.

Roadside Is Its Own Kind of Work

Treating roadside like a small tow wastes trucks. A jump start doesn't need a flatbed, and sending one to a lockout ties up your most flexible equipment for a ten-minute job. Roadside calls are better handled by a service truck or whatever unit is closest and equipped, so the rollbacks stay free for actual tows.

Roadside also runs on a different clock. A tow might take an hour and a half from dispatch to drop. A jump start can be done in fifteen minutes including the drive. Mixing the two without thinking means a customer with a dead battery waits behind a long transport, which is a bad trade for everybody. Keeping roadside visible as its own type of call lets dispatch slot the quick ones in where they fit.

That is why Roadside — jump start, lockout, tire change, fuel delivery and winch-out — is its own category in TowingBossPro, separate from Light-Duty Tows, Heavy-Duty Tows, Accident & Recovery, Impound & Storage and Transports.

Intake for Roadside Calls

Good roadside intake is mostly about one question: is this really a roadside call? A tire change with no usable spare is a tow. A jump start on a battery that's been dead for a month may turn into a tow. A winch-out where the vehicle is badly stuck or damaged might need more truck than you think.

Ask enough to know: what exactly happened, whether there's a spare and a jack, what kind of fuel, whether the keys are visible in the car, how stuck it is. Put the answers in the call notes so the driver sees them before he arrives. Vehicle details matter here too — year, make and model tell a lockout tech a lot about what he is walking into.

Dispatching Clusters of Small Jobs

Roadside calls are where the live map pays off. When the Waiting List shows three roadside calls on the same side of town, dispatch can circle them and assign them to one service truck in one step. Route order puts them in a sensible sequence, and the driver works through them one after another.

On a cold morning when half the calls are dead batteries, that clustering is the difference between a service truck that knocks out eight calls before lunch and one that spends the morning driving between them.

The Driver App on a Roadside Call

Roadside calls are short, so the app should be quick. The driver sees the call, taps on-the-way so the customer gets a text, navigates with one tap, taps arrival, does the work and taps complete. A couple of photos are still worth taking, especially on lockouts and winch-outs where something could get scratched.

Customers waiting on roadside service are usually stuck somewhere uncomfortable. The one-tap texts and the live driver map in the customer app make a fifteen-minute job feel like good service instead of a guessing game.

Billing Small Jobs Without Losing Them

Small jobs are the easiest to forget to bill. A driver collects nothing on scene, the call sheet gets lost, and a $75 lockout simply never gets invoiced. Multiply that by a busy month and it hurts.

In TowingBossPro, a completed roadside call becomes an invoice like any other. Customers can pay online through the customer app, or you can charge a card on file for repeat customers. If a roadside call came in under a commercial account, it bills under the account with the rest of their work.

Watching the Roadside Numbers

Because Roadside is its own category, your reports show how much of your work it is and how much it brings in. Some companies find roadside fills the slow hours nicely. Others find it is tying up trucks they need for tows at the busiest times. Either way, you want to know.

Roadside calls build relationships too. The person you jump-started in ten minutes is likely to call you when they need a real tow. For how roadside fits into the full call-to-paid system, see the towing software overview.