Towing Company Dispatch and CRM

The shape of the night

Three jobs, two phones, one truck

The first call lands at 11.47pm. A roadside partner needs a Toyota Hilux off the Monaro Highway, the owner is shaken, the insurer wants photos before sunrise. You quote, you accept, you swing the truck around, you message your wife.

The second call lands while you are hooking up. It is the police rank in town, single vehicle into a guardrail, no injury, they need it cleared by shift change. You jot a registration on the back of a docket and keep loading.

The third call is a fleet account chasing the storage invoice from last Thursday. They want it split: excess to the driver, body damage to the insurer, admin to the head office. The spreadsheet is on the laptop, the laptop is at home, the customer is standing in the rain asking when she can collect her car.

Most towing companies live this every week. The work is not the problem. The paperwork that follows the work, the SMS the customer never got, the photo nobody took at the yard gate, that is what eats the margin and the marriage.

What we build

A towing company dispatch and CRM that runs the night with you

Your website becomes the front door for roadside partners, insurers, councils, and stranded drivers. Behind it sits the dispatch board, the driver app, the yard ledger, and the customer portal. One system, one source of truth, one monthly retainer that keeps it shaped to how you actually work.

Core build for towing

+Public site with partner intake and 24/7 booking form
+Dispatch board with job state, ETA, and live driver location
+Driver app for accept, on the way, on scene, loaded, delivered
+Photo capture at pickup, arrival, and yard storage bay
+SMS updates to the stranded customer at every status change
+Invoice splits across insurance, customer, and fleet account
+Yard storage rate calculator with daily and part-day rules
+Customer portal for vehicle retrieval, ID checks, and storage payment
+Partner contract terms, rate cards, and referral source tagging
+Police, council, and insurer report exports in their formats
+Monthly retainer for changes, on-call fixes, and quiet improvements

Recurring care

The retainer is what makes the system yours, not ours. Rate cards change, a new insurer comes on, a council asks for a different export, a driver requests a bigger button on the app. You message us, we ship the change, you keep towing. We hold the hosting, the deploys, the backups, the small refinements that pile up over a year. No surprise quotes for a tweak, no waiting weeks for a new contract field, no second agency to brief.

How it runs in your week

From the call landing to the keys handed back

The call comes in. It might be a roadside partner via their portal, an insurer over the phone, or a member of the public on the booking form. Whichever channel, the job lands on the dispatch board with the source tagged, the rate card pre-applied, and the right invoicing split waiting.

You accept on your phone or the driver does on theirs. The customer gets an SMS with your name, the truck rego, and a live tracking link. They stop calling back to ask where you are. The shoulder of the highway feels less lonely when the phone is saying the truck is fifteen minutes out.

At the scene, the driver app prompts the photos: registration plate, damage front and rear, hookup point, odometer. At the yard, the same prompts repeat for the bay number and condition. Every photo is timestamped, geotagged, and attached to the job. The insurer dispute that used to take a week of emails takes a link.

The customer portal does the rest. The owner logs in with the job reference, sees the photos, sees the storage clock with the rate calculator running, pays the storage and admin, books a collection slot. You hand the keys back at the yard without a single printed form. The fleet account invoice is already in the accountant's inbox, already split the way the contract says.

Common questions

Before you brief us.

We already use a basic dispatch app. Do we have to throw it out?

Not on day one. We start by wrapping the website, the customer SMS flow, and the partner intake around what you have. Once that is stable and your partners and insurers are using the new front door, we migrate the dispatch board and driver app at a pace that suits the yard. Most owner-operators run a parallel period of two to four weeks where the old app handles live jobs and the new system handles new partner work, then we switch over on a quiet Sunday.

How does the invoicing split between insurer, customer, and fleet account work?

Each partner and fleet account has a contract record with the rate card, the storage rules, and the split logic. When a job is created, the dispatcher picks the source and the system pre-fills the split: for example, insurer pays the tow and admin, customer pays the excess and any after-hours surcharge, fleet pays the storage. You can override any line at closeout. Invoices generate as separate PDFs per payer with the same job reference, so reconciliation in your accounting software stays clean.

What happens at 3am when something breaks?

The retainer covers an on-call channel for production incidents: dispatch board down, SMS not sending, driver app stuck. You message, we respond. We also run automated checks on the SMS gateway, the payment processor, and the database, so most problems get caught and fixed before you notice. For non-urgent requests, like a new partner rate card or a tweak to the storage calculator, we work through them inside the retainer hours during the week.

Will the customer portal really stop the phone calls about storage?

It cuts them heavily but not to zero. The portal shows the live storage clock, the rate breakdown, the ID documents required, and the available collection slots. Customers who would have rung you three times to ask the same questions now self-serve. The calls that remain tend to be the ones worth taking: disputes, special circumstances, repeat fleet customers who want to talk to a person. You stop being the after-hours call centre for your own paperwork.

Can the system handle police and council referrals with their own reporting?

Yes. Police and council jobs get their own source tag and a job template that captures the fields they ask for: incident reference, attending officer, road authority directive, hold status. Reports export in the formats your local stations and councils prefer, whether that is a monthly CSV, a per-job PDF, or a direct email to a nominated address. As their requirements change, we update the templates inside the retainer.

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