Last Updated: November 2025
🔎In this article: discover six key signals that your towing management software may be slowing your ability to grow your business. We’ll cover questions to ask, common pain points, and what to look for in a modern TMS solution that supports scalability and efficiency.
You’ve built your towing business on outstanding customer service and strong relationships. As your company expands, towing management software problems that were once manageable can become barriers to growth. Often, obstacles stem from the inability of your towing management software (TMS) t0 keep pace with your needs.
Here are six critical questions you can ask to help determine if your current TMS can support the next phase of growth or if you need to upgrade in order to best serve your towing business.
1️⃣ Does Your Towing Management Software Provide the Data and Reporting You Need?
Growing a towing business demands immediate access to real-time (or near real-time) data. Without it, you’re at an operational and a customer service disadvantage. Your TMS should provide concise, actionable reports without requiring hours of manual preparation, enabling you to respond quickly and accurately to customers. Supported by the right software, you may be able to reassign staff who were previously manually extracting data to other, more profitable tasks.
For strategic planning, you need deep, historic visibility. Look for a solution that includes invoice status, call logs, asset locations, staff whereabouts, accounts receivable, daily and historical metrics, pricing, and service details. Your ability to quickly collect and thoughtfully analyze this data to identify what’s working and what isn’t empowers you to make informed growth decisions, optimize investments, drive efficiency, and measure results against a baseline.
2️⃣ Is Your TMS flexible enough to support new lines of business and revenue?
Use modern towing management software to build new lines of revenue while improving customer service.
The towing industry is filled with stories family-run operations growing into larger players. As you scale — adding equipment, staff, and sources of work — your software must be ready to support your development. The TMS vendor you choose must demonstrate their ability to help you succeed at every stage.
Growth often means taking on more complex contracts. These may include municipal or law enforcement work, vehicle transport, or specialty loads. Each has specific needs, requires robust integration, and a vendor partner with the experience, technology maturity, and staff committed to supporting your ability to manage, bill, and report efficiently for all lines of business. If you have difficulty managing complex towing jobs, it may be time to investigate an upgrade.
3️⃣ Can Your Towing Management Software Handle Complex Billing and Invoicing?
Growth brings more complicated jobs. Jobs may include multi-vehicle incidents with several responsible parties. Your TMS should make it easy to support complex pricing models for these larger jobs. Likewise, it should enable accurate invoicing when the job needs invoices for a combination of leasing companies, owner-operators, insurance carriers, freight insurers, and more.
For example, a tractor trailer rollover involving multiple vehicles may require multiple pieces of specialized equipment. It may also involve a carrier leasing company, a company-owned fleet or an owner-operator, multiple insurance carriers covering the tractor trailer, others involved in the rollover, and one or more insurance companies covering the damaged freight being transported in the trailer.
A system that can’t manage this complexity without excessive manual work will slow down your operations. Look for a TMS that can handle business complexity and reduces time needed to support jobs on the back end. Investigate solutions that reduce person-hours required to manage, reconcile, and report on credit card processing to streamline work for jobs of any size.
4️⃣ Is Your Towing Dispatch Software User-Friendly and Reliable?
Your team’s positive experience with your TMS and the vendor behind it can fuel your growth. And frustration can impede growth. Focus on three essentials to evaluate where you stand and where you want to go:
- Accurate Dispatch: The right equipment and personnel must reach the correct location on the first try. Your TMS should offer reliable, precise mapping and multiple job detail communication options for operators to reduce customer frustration, wasted fuel, and operator time.
- Ease of Use Across Devices: Operators and back-office staff need a system that’s fast, intuitive, and reliable. When your team can work quickly and accurately with real-time status updates, when software works quickly, and when user interfaces require little training, staff morale rises, and thus customer satisfaction rises.
- Maximum Uptime: Towing is a 24/7 business. Even brief outages can mean lost revenue, broken commitments, and safety risks, especially during peak periods. Your TMS must be robust and dependable.
5️⃣ Do Your TMS Have the Role-Based Access Controls Needed for a Growing Team?
As your business grows, so does your team. Your TMS must offer flexible role-based access controls, ensuring that employees and contractors can only view and interact with data relevant to their responsibilities. This isn’t just about security and protecting proprietary information. It also streamlines training, reduces errors, and prevents costly mistakes that can slow your business or impact customers.
Related: Cybersecurity: Best Practices for Towing Businesses
6️⃣ Is Your Towing Management Software Vendor a True Partner in Your Growth?
Your TMS provider should be more than just a software vendor. They should be a partner in your success. Evaluate the product’s capabilities as well as support, training, and willingness to help you grow and adapt as your business evolves.
If your current towing management solution falls short in any of these areas, it may be time to consider a change. The right Towing Management Software and an experienced, committed vendor partner will unlock new opportunities, streamline your operations, and help your towing business reach its next stage of growth.
Request a demo of Towing Management Software from Autura.
